Inside the Nucleus

Five parts settling a debt owed to another category. The chemistry track that opened the atom said the proton number cannot be changed by anything chemistry does, then noted that it does change in nuclear processes — and that those sit outside the subject. This is what sits outside it. It starts from a problem chemistry had no reason to raise: every proton in a nucleus repels every other, so a nucleus should not exist. It does because of a force about a hundred times stronger, which reaches almost no distance at all — and that asymmetry decides everything, because repulsion acts right across the nucleus while the glue binds only neighbours. Past bismuth nothing can hold. The second part sorts the three ways out, where alpha and beta transmute one element into another and gamma changes no number at all. The third asks what the radiation does on arrival, which is one mechanism — knocking electrons off atoms — and is why light and radio are radiation and harmless. The fourth holds two things that sound contradictory: no one can say when a single nucleus will decay, and a sample halves on an exact schedule, because nuclei do not age and billions of random chances average out. And the last uses that as a clock on something nobody saw die.