In the standard understanding of the strong force interaction as defined by quantum chromodynamics, pions are loosely portrayed as Goldstone bosons of spontaneously broken chiral symmetry. That explains why the masses of the three kinds of pions are considerably less than that of the other mesons, such as the scalar or vector mesons. If their current quarks were massless particles, it could make the chiral symmetry exact and thus the Goldstone theorem would dictate that all pions have a zero mass. Empirically, since the light quarks actually have minuscule nonzero masses, the pions also have nonzero rest masses. However, those masses are "almost an order of magnitude smaller" than that of the nucleons, roughly ≈ ≈ 45 MeV, where are the relevant current-quark masses in MeV, around 5−10 MeV.