Back in the day, before the commie scare ran out of steam, the world, with
the US leading the way, spent billions of dollars on an eventually aborted
attempt to build something called a Super Collider. This machine, in
simplistic terms, was to be a REALLY REALLY BIG electro-magnet, BIGGGG
enough to create racetracks for protons to race around in.
Protons, according to particle physicists, are not as simple as people my
age were taught some 30 years ago. Back then, they taught us that
everything
was made out of atoms, and that atoms were made out of electrons, protons,
and neutrons. But, that is no longer the whole picture. Particle physics
now
holds that protons and neutrons are made out of something they gave the
truly comic book level name of "Quarks".
But, it gets any more curioser and curisoer. There are supposed to be six
different types of quarks. So, scientists gave them the highly technical
names of UP, DOWN, CHARM, STRANGE, TOP, and BOTTOM. What ...no Sneezy,
no
Rudolph, no Grumpy?
These six types of Quarks are referred to as "flavors".
But ... no one has actually seen or even being able to measure the mass of
a
quark. Because, the official story goes, Quarks can only exist in Hadrons
(another highly technical term). Hadrons are particles which are made up
of
Quarks or Gluions. Hadrons composed of just Gluions were given the, once
again, highly technical term of Glueballs .. no, really that is what
scientists call them.
So ... if we can't see Quarks, and we can't measure them, how do we know
they exist?
I am reading all this, a new area of knowledge for me, and I find myself
thinking, you know, this really does sound like something I would have
read
decades ago in the Superman-Bizarro comic book series.
Istlota
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