Unlike the other fundamental forces, the strong interaction also acts on the strong exchange particles themselves, since gluons also carry color charge. This leads to a very limited range of the strong interaction (not much farther than the hadron's radius) even though the gluon does not have mass. It also has the strange effect that the force gets stronger as the distance between the quarks increases. This effect prevents free quarks from being observed. As the distance between two quarks increases, the amount of energy in the force between them increases. If the force becomes strong enough, there is enough energy to create new quarks. The reason of this is that one only sees quarks in pairs or triplets and never individually.
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