Tracking Colour & Charge: Investigating Quark Behaviour

[kurious]

Individual quarks change colour as time passes.
Since colour is physically tied to electric charge - colour and electric charge travel through space together - why doesn't a change in colour change the electric charge of the quark somehow? And when a muon loses mass and becomes an electron, shouldn't
there also be some property associated with the charge that changes?

 

[marlon]

I think you are mixing two different interactions here. The colour-number has to do with the strong force. The connection between these two is the fact that in quark-interactions, the "total" colour of all interacting quarks has to be neutral. this is called the colour confinement. A baryon cannot have colour so the three colours of the constituant quarks add up to "white".

The reason why a quark has an electric charge comes from the fact that this is a conserved quantity in fermion interactions when we look at the elektromagnetic interactions. It has nothing to do with the strong force, which has the dominant influence when it comes to inter-quark-interactions. otherwise an atomic nucleus would not be held together because of protons repelling each other.

So electric charge doesn't have a colour because of the different types of interactions.