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| Olivia Wilde as evil queen; Alec Baldwin as magic mirror |
Since Alec Baldwin has been in the news, especially his humorous SNL skit, I couldn't resist the double entendre. Follow below...
"The quark model was independently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964." (Wikipedia)
Apparently, Gell-Mann won creds in the cool naming category as he sourced it "from the book 'Finnegan's Wake' by James Joyce. The line "Three quarks for Muster Mark..." appears in the fanciful book. Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize for his work in classifying elementary particles." (Hyperphysics)
I understand this naming completely: Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebniz had discovered the derivative and anti-derivative independently. Sir Isaac wanted to call the new math "fluxions"; Liebniz Calculus. Thankfully, Calculus won out.
Naming does matter: e.g., political Calculus sounds way better than political fluxions...that almost sounds dirty!
Quarks have six "flavors": up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. It's the last they think discovered at the Large Haydron Collider. The botton quark (also called the "beauty quark" - sounds like a few particle physicists need to get out of the lab more), was discovered in 1977, at Fermilab an experimental group led by Leon Lederman (a.k.a. "The God Particle" guy) discovered a new resonance at 9.4 GeV/c2 which was interpreted as a bottom-antibottom quark pair and called the Upsilon meson. This is also the same Lederman "taking the Lord's name in vain" voicing his frustration on not finding God Particle/Higgs Boson, or any other such thing under heaven at near light speed particle collisions.
Good news for the LHC...
BBC Science: LHC reports discovery of its first new particle
Physics arXiv: Observation of a New χb State in Radiative Transitions to ϒ(1S) and ϒ(2S) at ATLAS
Hyperphysics: Quarks
Wikipedia: Quarks
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