In the absence of electrons, what kept the protons clinging together? Was it possible that the electrical repulsion between 2 protons is replaced by an attraction if those protons were pushed together closely enough? Can there be both an attraction _and_ a repulsion, with the former the more important at very short range? If this were so, that hypothetical attraction would have to have two properties. First, it would have to be extremely strong—strong enough to overcome the repulsion of two positive charges at very close quarters. Secondly, it would have to be short-range, for no attractive force between protons of any kind was ever detected outside the nucleus. In addition, this short-range attraction would have to involve the neutron. The hydrogen-1 nucleus was made up of a single proton, but all nuclei containing more than 1 proton had to contain neutrons also to be stable, and only certain numbers of neutrons. Until the discovery of the neutron, only two kinds of forces, or “interactions”, were known in the universe. These were the “gravitational interaction” and the “electromagnetic interaction”. The electromagnetic interaction was much the stronger of the two—trillions and trillions and trillions of times as strong as the gravitational attraction. The electromagnetic attraction, however, includes both attraction (between opposite electric charges or between opposite magnetic poles) and repulsion (between like electric charges or magnetic poles). In ordinary bodies, the attractions and repulsions usually cancel each other entirely or nearly entirely, leaving very little of one or the other to be detected as surplus. The gravitational interaction, however, includes only attraction and this increases with mass. By the time you have gigantic masses such as the earth or the sun, the gravitational interaction between them and other bodies is also gigantic. Both the gravitational and electromagnetic interactions are long-range. The intensity of each interaction declines with distance but only as the square of the distance. If the distance between earth and sun were doubled, the gravitational interaction would still be one-fourth what it is now. If the distance were increased ten times, the interaction would still be 1/(10 × 10) or 1/100 what it is now. It is for this reason that gravitational and electromagnetic interactions can make themselves felt over millions of miles of space. But now, with the acceptance of the proton-neutron theory of nuclear structure, physicists began to suspect the existence of a third interaction—a “nuclear interaction”—much stronger than the electromagnetic interaction, perhaps 130 times as strong. Furthermore, the nuclear interaction had to decline very rapidly with distance much more rapidly than the electromagnetic interaction did.