The Discovery of Quarks - Particles with Different flavors
Scientists thought protons were fundamental particles. Then they smashed them together and discovered something mind-bending
A thread on Quarks, the rebellious particles with colors, flavors - Thread🧵
Scientists thought protons were fundamental particles. Then they smashed them together and discovered something mind-bending
A thread on Quarks, the rebellious particles with colors, flavors - Thread🧵
in 1960s Physicists had a "particle zoo" problem. They'd discovered hundreds of subatomic particles and couldn't make sense of the chaos. Protons, neutrons, mesons, baryons... it was like having 200 "fundamental" building blocks. Something was wrong!
But a famous Physicist, Murray Gell-Mann had a crazy idea - What if all these particles were just different combinations of smaller, more fundamental pieces?
In 1964, he proposed particles made of mysterious constituents he playfully named "quarks" (from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake).
In 1964, he proposed particles made of mysterious constituents he playfully named "quarks" (from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake).
Quarks come in 6 "flavors" with the most ridiculous names in science -
up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top .
They also have "colors" - but not actual colors! Red, blue, and green are just labels for a property that keeps them bound together.
up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top .
They also have "colors" - but not actual colors! Red, blue, and green are just labels for a property that keeps them bound together.
But here's a Catch!!
The Quarks can NEVER exist alone. They suffer from "color confinement"—try to pull quarks apart, and the force gets stronger! It's like a rubber band that never breaks but creates new particles instead. The harder you pull, the more quarks appear!
The Quarks can NEVER exist alone. They suffer from "color confinement"—try to pull quarks apart, and the force gets stronger! It's like a rubber band that never breaks but creates new particles instead. The harder you pull, the more quarks appear!
The discovery came from "deep inelastic scattering" experiments at Stanford in the late 1960s. Scientists fired electrons at protons at incredible speeds and noticed the electrons were bouncing off something small and hard inside—like shooting marbles at a bag of ball bearings!
A proton contains TWO up quarks and ONE down quark, but their masses add up to only 1% of the proton's total mass! The other 99% comes from the ENERGY of the strong force holding them together.
The Quarks gave us the Standard Model—our best theory of fundamental particles. It's like having the periodic table of the universe! Every particle is made from combinations of quarks and leptons, governed by 4 fundamental forces.
The Large Hadron Collider smashes protons to study quarks at extreme energies. When quarks get hot enough (2 trillion degrees!), they break free and form "quark-gluon plasma"—the same state that existed microseconds after the Big Bang!
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