>>12799216>How the fuck does a gluon workGluons are what's called a "force propagator" just like a photon or a W/Z bosons. Gluons mediate the strong force, which is mediated between quarks and their constituent particles. The details of how it works is pretty complex, but the simplified version is that a gluon can be emitted by quarks and can create quark-antiquark pairs.
>why doesn't the general public learn many details about this stuff if our entire world is made out of fundamental particles?Because it's a very niche field and your average Joe's life isn't affected by it in any way. You need to go through 6 years of college to begin to understand this stuff, and even most physicists don't know the details, only high-energy physicists who specialize in that stuff.
>So does a gluon have a physical location and it travels from one quark to the nextNobody in the field asks these questions because they make absolutely no difference to the experiment and therefore aren't falsifiable. While gluons have no mass, they can self-interact unlike photons, and therefore can't propagate long distances like photons. This is why the strong force only manifests itself at nuclear distances. To put it another way, gluons don't travel on their own for long and are intermediate particles in interactions.
>physically touching the quark?define "touch". A high-energy physicist would probably interpret this as what we call an "interaction vertex", where quark and gluon fields interact to annihilate or create quarks and gluons. Whether that counts as "touch" is a matter of semantics.
>Or does it not have a location and it somehow expels from one quark and affects the other one without actually moving in space?No, gluons have a position and momentum just like any other particle.
>And how on Earth does that mechanism keep the quarks held together?Well the force is attractive and it is stronger than the electromagnetic force, hence the name.
