You never get to see a naked quark (what, you thought you were going to see one just then? Patience, patience – the next two links have VERY revealing photos!). Scientists think there are six kinds of quarks (up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange are their names, and one of them is an adjective that certainly applies to their selected names) and they are bound together in various combinations to make different other subatomic particles like protons and neutrons. A bunch of quarks move around inside the particle they create like peas in a pod. But try to take one of the quarks away from the other(s) – make it “naked” – and an incredibly strong attractive force appears as if by magic to keep them all together. When quark-composite particles like protons ARE finally split with powerful particle accelerators, in the wink of an eye they reform into some different particle – another batch of quarks, not necessarily the same ones you started with, in a different kind of “pod”. That’s particle physics in a nutshell.
If you can’t see a naked quark, sometimes you can see it sort of half-naked, like it was doing a fan dance. (See, who said physics-by-analogy had to be boring!) Two experiments discussed this week have done just that. The first experiment, by Gerald Miller of University of Washington, leads physicists to the conclusion that protons aren’t always spherically shaped, like a basketball. Turns out only a proton at rest can be shaped like a spherical ball – the expected shape and the only one described in physics textbooks. A moving proton, however, can be shaped like a peanut, like an (American) football or even something similar to a bagel. The variety of shapes is nearly limitless and depends on the speed of the quarks inside the proton and what direction they are spinning, said Miller. This is an important new clue trying to tell us something about quarks and the force between them – but what?
The second experiment offers clues to what the individual weights of the six quarks are – hey, how can you ever know the body weight of someone so shy they never get naked? By smashing together either two deuterium atoms or a neutron and a proton, a long-sought but never-before-seen pion particle was produced exhibiting something called charge symmetry breaking – a fancy name for a quark fan dance. Two months of day-and-night work yielded just a few dozen data points. Yet: “This is a new and significant discovery, and an immense technical achievement,” comments physicist Gerald Miller (yeah, the guy that did the first experiment). Theoreticians will study the pion debris from these collisions, and the rate at which the reactions occurred. They hope that this will lead them backwards into the intact nucleus, to understand how much of the up/down difference is due to mass and how much to electrical charge. From this they could work out the quarks’ masses. Inconsequential? Nope. Quark mass differences decided the original composition of the Universe, explains theoretical physicist Bira van Kolck of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “When protons and neutrons combined to form the elements in the first few minutes after the Big Bang, the resulting abundances [of chemical elements] depended on the differences in their [quark] masses.”
So don’t let anybody ever fool you, physicists are human too – always peeking through cracks, trying to see a pretty thing naked.
Hey ricky, I know physicists are generally the life of the party, but you don’t have to exaggerate, you know :) Quarks are interesting enough without having to dress them up, so to speak…
Reminds me of a friend of mine who innocently titled a paper “interacting hard core dirty bosons”…
We’ve been getting a LOT of hits (tens of thousands) in the past couple of weeks from the somewhat irreverent news site called Fark, which I had never heard of and which linked to our weird finch and squid stories. They have a news column called “boobies”, you figure it out. We’ve also been getting hundreds of hits on the April Fools Ridge Ashcroft satire from a site run by a guy named Orling Grabb who is apparently an ex-CIA guy running a daily Tom-Clancy style news site with a – how shall I say this – unique editorial layout. These recent new revelations to me about alternative news presentation styles made me comment to Drog in an email that maybe SFT should add a soft porn angle to boost readership…I was joking, just kidding, don’t panic…which got me to thinking….I recently just got thru reading one of Max Allen Collins’ historical murder mysteries with Nathan Heller where he routinely meets all the famous people from the 1930s, including you guessed it, Miss Rand…
Sweetwind? Alan? Tongue-In-Cheek thoughts?
OK, OK, back to my usual staid boring science lecture style…
Did you see she was in fact a scientific intellectual? She did her own R&D to develop the balloons for her bubble dance – no small feat in the 1930s – and she lectured at Harvard. Obviously a well-rounded (ahem) individual who would no doubt have been a daily SFT reader herself.
Fascinating to know that hadrons jet all over the place; though I can’t wait to see how many feminsts, purists, anti-child-pornists and other -ists take umbrage at this one. Personally I enjoyed the tone of the article (and learned something too), although I don’t suppose I would want all SFT stories to be delivered in the same style. My favourite description of the evolution of particle theory is still the few words at the beginning of my childhood copy of Superman: Last Son of Krypton. I don’t remember the quote exactly, but it went something like: “Once men thought God’s love move the stars and the planets, and everything on them. Then the atom was discovered and it was evident that everything was ordered by the interaction of those atoms. The behaviour of atoms was discovered to be dictated by the behaviour of sub-atomic particles, which acted entirely at random. God’s love moved the sub-atomic particles.” Corny I know, but the back to square-one, still don’t know what we’re doing, aspect appeals to my twisted mind.
…you’d read the posting advice at Teemings and decided to give it a try… :-)
(loved your teasers about the links, though, and what they actually pointed to! Great for a one-time joke.)
Actually you did a very nice job of getting the story across, skating around the edges of entendres and bringing it back. When I said I wouldn’t like all SFT stories to be like this, it’s because sex-jokes can soon wear thin, as well as because I already enjoy the factual style mixed with a little quirkiness that Drog and yourself (as well as others) have presented us with to date. Any thoughts on going into sci-journalism full-time? (by which I mean getting paid for it; your output is already larger than a lot of professionals).
…to make what I’m making now salary-wise as an aerospace engineer and I will chain myself to the science journalism keyboard. Actually, my SFT experiences have shown me I COULD write a book if I wanted to, which I’m always saying to myself I do. Now if only I could find a topic I’m willing to stick with for a whole year; SFT is cool because I get to butterfly.
Salary-wise I don’t know, but wait a year or so for SFT to get the recognition it deserves and use the fame and glory attached to your name(!) to produce an eclectic collection of scientific articles with hot naked chicks thrown in. That’s more or less how the guys at The Onion sold collections of rehashed stories from their site. Maybe it isn’t quite that easy, but when you consider some of the boring collections of Internet stories/articles/’wit!’ that slide from the shelves to the Christmas tree each year, you’ve got to be in with a chance.
Maybe you could write a daily syndicated science column for newspapers. Or a weekly/monthly one for magazines. You have a real talent for expressing complicated scientific concepts in a refreshing manner that is both easy to understand and witty. I would think a lot of newspapers and magazines would be interested, Ricky. If you emailed the editors of all the major U.S. newspapers (and perhaps even foreign ones in Canada, UK and Australia), giving them examples of some of your best stories and telling them where to read all the rest of them, I’m willing to bet you’ll get some responses. And judging by how quickly you are able to write, you may be able to still keep your day job while being rewarded monetarily for being a science writer. Eventually, you may be able to make enough money to be a science writer full-time, and parlay your fame into a book deal.