Nuclear physics forces you to imagine blobs of protons and neutrons wiggling around in a very quantum-mechanical way. Nuclei are too complicated to fully understand. We can simulate them on a computer, but simulation is not understanding, and it’s also very hard: one book I’m reading points out that one computation you might want to do requires diagonalizing a 10 14×10 1410^{14} \times 10^{14} matrix. So I’d rather learn about the many simplified models of nuclei people have create...
