What Are Quarks? Existence & Properties

[alteredmind]

well, what are they? do they exist?

 

[Nugatory]

They exist. Google will bring up many explanations at various levels of mathematical sophistication; start there and we'll be better able to help you when you have more specific questions.

 

[jedishrfu]

Quarks are real. They are the fundamental particles of all protons, neutrons and other hadrons. They were theorized to exist in 1964 to explain the large variety of hadrons that were discovered by early particle physicists and were later confirmed to exist during the deep inelastic collision experiments in 1968 which showed that protons and neutrons cantained still smaller particles and weren't fundamental.

You can read more here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarks

The name quark came from the James Joyce novel Finnigan's Wake where one of characters says: Three quarks for Muster Mark

Murray Gell-Mann liked the phrase because it fit the new particles which came in threes.

 

[Delta2]

Well wikipedia has quite a good article about quarks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarks.

Briefly what i would say about quarks is that they are elementary point particles. They come in six flavors that is we have six different types of quarks. Quarks cannot be observed free in nature (as say we can have free electrons, electron is not a quark however it is probably the most well known elementary point particle of the standard model), quarks glue together with other quarks under strong nuclear ineractions to form composite particles like protons and neutrons.

 

[ChrisVer]

quarks is just in a nice model which is used to describe the interactions of hadrons and mesons...
They exist in the way they give correct results- however we've never isolated one..

 

[alteredmind]

okay, thankyou folks for confirming that. I do remember seeng somewehre that quarks were particles that were have said to be supernatural or spirit particles. that was probably some pesduoscience, I can't remember where exactly I read that on the net and where I read that also said that a seas ship secretly dumped ancient relics or something like that into the ocean.

 

[phinds]

okay, thankyou folks for confirming that. I do remember seeng somewehre that quarks were particles that were have said to be supernatural or spirit particles. that was probably some pesduoscience, I can't remember where exactly I read that on the net and where I read that also said that a seas ship secretly dumped ancient relics or something like that into the ocean.

Uh ... you really need to stop watching TV and read some real science.

 

[alteredmind]

Uh ... you really need to stop watching TV and read some real science.

uhm, I said it was on the internent, not tv

 

[micromass]

uhm, I saidit was on the internent, not tv

I think you should stop visiting those kind of sites, or at least you should stop believing anything on there.

 

[alteredmind]

I think you should stop visiting those kind of sites, or at least you should stop believing anything on there.

It was along time ago when I visited that site. I don't balieve anything on there, IIIII do not believe in anything supernatural and I think you shouldn't tell people what to do.

 

[Char. Limit]

But my good sir, telling people what to do is human nature.

 

[phinds]

uhm, I said it was on the internent, not tv

Yeah, sorry. I always just assume when people have boneheaded "facts" about science they got them from TV since it is SO full of them so I didn't notice that you did in fact say the net.

 

[Chronos]

Don't worry about it. I watch Ancient Aliens and Michio Kaku specials on tv. Highly amusing.

 

[phinds]

Don't worry about it. I watch Ancient Aliens and Michio Kaku specials on tv. Highly amusing.

Yeah, I've posted a couple times here about horse laughs I've gotten from Ancient Aliens. The best one was when they said that Einstein actually wasn't all that smart, he just had the ability to bond telepathically with aliens who fed him science. It's a hoot sometimes, which is why I surf through it every now and then.