I think this would be misleading once you dive deeper into particle physics. The strong interaction is really »the interaction mediated by gluons between color-charged things«.

• Gluons interact with gluons, without the need for quarks.

• Many (almost all) bound quark states are not found in nuclei, only uud (protons) and udd (neutrons) are. But there are also all the mesons (e.g. the pion), and a whole lot of other baryons (xis and sigmas and what have you) exist.

To put this into perspective, it feels a bit like calling electromagnetic interaction the »chemical interaction«, because chemistry is explained for the most part by the interaction of electrons. But that would leave out a lot of different ways matter can interact, like Bremsstrahlung, positrons, proton/proton repulsion, and all that.

They aren't tied to the nucleus of the atom in any way. It's just that they were discovered in phenomena involving atom nucleus.

I have indeed often seen the names referred to without the term "nuclear".

This might be a new variant of: You can tell how old a national lab is by what they study in the "physics" division.

Weird. This must have changed in the past 10 years or so, since I've been out of college.

This (very important) paper from 1967 calls them "weak interaction" and "strong interaction": https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.19...

Putting the word "nuclear" in the middle seems to just be done in textbooks and classrooms.

It's something you never get used to. As you get older, this will just keep happening. We used to put commas before the last item in a list back in like the stone ages when I was in school. My SAT score looked really lame for a bit of time when those suddenly changed.

I understand the grumpy old person archetype now. I feel like I've been one for a long time, but it's really hitting home over the past decade.