Gluons: A Real Thing in Particle Physics

Gluons sound ridiculous, but they are a real thing in particle physics. They exist in nature, sticking your quarks together to make you. The other way you should think about it is that quarks have a field. Quark can be like blue or green or red, and so it can have a field, a color field. And thatcolor field pulls or pushes on other things that have color charges to them. So for example, that quark inside your proton is a color field, and that's applying a force to the other quarks inside the proton.