Simon Danaher As you read this, every atom in your body is desperately trying to tear itself apart. In fact, that goes for every atom, everywhere, since the beginning of time. Thankfully, those efforts have failed. These self-destructive tendencies relate to the nucleus, a tiny knot of matter at the centre of every atom. Inside, protons are packed shoulder to shoulder, each one bristling with positive charge and frantic to get away from its companions. If atoms obeyed only electricity and magnetism, the universe would have been a brief, bright firework. Instead, something else intervenes, a force so strong it makes electromagnetism look feeble. This maintains the solid furniture of reality by keeping the building blocks of atoms glued together. But the deeper physicists have probed this force, the stranger it has seemed.…