Quark Strangeness and Yarn

Hello. This has strong ties with "Gauge this", but nothing is repeated, just reinforced.

Quark.

Armin Shimmerman? No.

I refer to the little people inside everything.

Here is what we have so far - - -

Atoms > > Nuclei > > protons and neutrons > > quarks?

What are they?

To illustrate, a potted history would help.

The Geeks, sorry, Greeks (bless 'em) figured out that stuff is made of smaller stuff.

They called them "atoms" and thought by reasoning alone, that nothing could be smaller. They were wrong.

Then John Dalton came along in the eighteenth century (didn't take THAT long, did it?) and did a bit more work on the idea, and came up with "elements".

There are 92 of these in nature, and what came about was that these "atoms" were not indivisible at all. Earnest Rutherford showed that by splitting them.

It turned out that they were made up of tinier bits which we called "electrons" and "protons". It took a while (until 1932 actually) to work out that there was another in there also (the "neutron"), but basically we thought we had the atom sussed.

What came about next was a mixture of conjugation and speculature ("conspecularity" if you like).

If protons were all the same electrical charge, and they were all packed together tightly in the nucleus, how come all atoms never flew apart ( a few do by themselves - this is called "radioactivity").

Think about it.

The only possible answer we could give was that there was another "force" stronger than electrostatics, but only available at very short distances ( a bit like two very passionate lovers )

To be picturesque, if I held a proton in each hand ( let's just say they were the size of tennis balls ), and tried to bring them together, I would feel an enormous force trying to keep them apart. This is called "electrostatic repulsion".

At some point, though, if I was strong enough, when these tennis balls were, say, 6cm apart, they would snap together as if there was an elastic band between them. This is called "the strong force".

Back to reality, then. This "strong force" (scientists are not heavily overvocabulariated) pulls the protons together inside the nucleus, despite the electrostatic process which asks them to go away.

But the end is NOT nigh.

It was established in the 1960's that this type of "strong" force was only a mere shadow of the strength of the "true nature of the Force" (see my post with the same title).

Okay, history lesson over.

The present case is this:

We now know that protons and neutrons are comprised of quarks. (See "three jets are better than two"). Electrons seem to have no structure at all (They may as well not be there). These quarks appear to act like electrons BUT we can never see one, simply because of this seeming cop-out of the very short range of the strong force. They remain inside the protons and neutrons and cannot get out.

They are constrained in a manner that is not unlike an elastic band.

Without going into further details, it will be sufficient to point out that it is like "electrostatic charge", but with not two but three different types of "charge".

They are called "red", "green", and "blue" (physicists are the World's Worst nomenclaturists (- apart from chemists, that is. I mean, who has ever heard of "1-bromo 3-dichloro 4-iodo pentane" for crying out loud???)

Anyway, back to the point, because this is what these "quarks" act like - points. The way of thinking now is that we imagine that inside the proton is a space as big as the earth. The three quarks in the proton will be smaller than a grain of sand each. They are free to roam, but can never get out. This is called "ultra-violet freedom".

BUT because of our quest to find the GUT (See my post "That GUT feeling"), the theory goes like this: If the quarks ever get close enough to shake hands (and we are talking two grains of sand in a container the size of the earth here), the WEAK force will assert itself and change one of them by exchanging one of the vector bosons, and the proton will effectively "decay" into a positron and an anti-neutrino. If this happens it is called "infra-red slavery" (We still are the champions of the non-vocabulary competitions - have to keep up appearances).

Because we are talking grains of sand inside a container the size of the Earth, it has been forecast that this will not happen for about :

100000000000000000000000000000000 years

(1 followed by 32 zeroes).

And I thought waiting for buses was bad