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Matter is not a force. Matter and forces are two different things in physics.

And the "strong force" is another thing altogether.

I think their point might be that matter is what defines the location of the force field. I.e. it's the EM field doing the actual work.

Yea, that is it, and I agree with them. When we say that a particle is at some x,y,z, we just mean that the space at that location behaves in a certain manner, for some reason.

And since we don't like mysteries, we say that there is a "particle" there with so and so properties..

It's more like "behaved", because particle measurement events are always historic. Quantum fields are statistical distributions of possible future particle measurement events within spacetime.

That is, until we find a way to unify the fields

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