Quarks & particle physics
Quarks:
Surprisingly, all the quarks were not discovered till the mid to late 20th century by a small number of smart physicists, in the United States, namely Murry Gel Man and his team. Quarks number 6 up-down – strange &charm – top & bottom with equally the same number of anti-quarks too.
When quarks come together, they naturally annihilate each other. The most common quarks are the up and down quarks found in our fundamental particles which make up protons and neutrons in atoms. Two up and one down quark makes a proton & one up and two down make up a neutron.
Each quark has a specific charge, a spin and a flavor which means nothing about the taste sorry.
When we look at the humble carbon atom as an example with an atomic radius is 0.0914 nm, this is small but things get a lot smaller as we unpack the atom.
Again, when it comes to size, the electron is the smaller of the group called Leptons. The rest mass of the electron is 9.1093837015 × 10−31 kg, which is only 1/1,836 the mass of a proton, essentially the same, however when it comes to quarks, the size of a quark is ~10−18 m. It is deemed that quarks are composed of smaller particles but there is no proof at this stage. String theory could be the alternative.
In 1990 the US finally announced their joint
discovery of the top quark in 1995, the final piece
in the puzzle. This completed for the Standard
Model of Physics, a complete Lepton –
Fermions, and Higgs and force carrier particles.
What is missing now is the completion of
quantum gravity to finish this profound need. If
and when this is done, it paves the way for the
completion of the TOE – Theory of Everything.
I hope you enjoyed this little ditty on our humble
quark, the smallest particle in the universe.
