In Larry Niven’s classic book “Ringworld,” a vast ring a million miles wide and about 200 million miles in diameter, with walls a thousand miles high, was built long ago by vastly advanced aliens. Set spinning around a star, this produced a truly vast living area, probably more than is available on all the natural Earth-like planets in the galaxy combined. One issue: the stresses placed ona Ringworld of this size are mind-bendlingly vast, many orders of magnitude greater than can be handled by any known material. Thus the ring was made of “scrith,” an insanely strong fictional material.
The stresses can be calculated, given various assumptions about the thickness and density of scrith, and the weight of dirt and water and air piled onto the inner surface. Not a challenge. But what has had me stumped for a few years: numerous descriptions of early calculations of the necessary tensile strength of scrith say that it needs to be as strong as the strong nuclear force. But what is the effective tensile strength of the strong nuclear force?
(From what I’ve read, to pull two quarks apart requires around 10,000 newtons, which is a surprisingly vast amount of force; and in the process of pulling two quarks apart, two more quarks are generated from the quantum vacuum due to the energies involved. And thus you don’t end up with two separate quarks, but with two pairs of quarks.)
