What's a Quark?
April 10, 1986
A review of "What's a Quark?" by Robert Palmer.
Copyright © 1997 Property of Deborah K. Fletcher. All rights reserved.
This article was similar to The Theory of Everything, which I have previously reviewd. It deal with the basic structure of quarks.
A quark is an elementary particle of matter, which is the fundamental building block of the universe. However, there are six flavours of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom; each flavour comes in three colours. Therefore, the fundamental becomes complex.
In order to understand the variety and structure of the quark, Fermilab is working with CERN, and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to build the 60-mile-circumference Superconducting Super Collider. This gargantuan accelerator would consist of a double ring of superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium. Proton beams would circle the rings in opposite directions, colliding at six points. The energy necessary for this would be a mere 40 TeV, or 40 trillion electron volts.
In 1983, six-tenths of a TeV were used by Rubbia and van der Meer at CERN to discover the radioactive W and Z particles. The Superconducting Super Collider, however, would look not at simple quarks, but at the Higgs particle, which is on the quark.
The Higgs is theorized to have been acquired by the, then massless, quarks when the universe was cooling down after the Big Bang. Therefore, the next logical step toward understanding the creation of everything is to go beyond the theory of everything to the study of the Higgs.
This article was shorter and simpler than those I have read previously on this topic. It was extremely easy to understand, but it would have been better if it had been longer, even if comprehension had been partially sacrificed.
I have found, in this article, the impetus to send me toward further studies of quarkian particles. I have learned of the Higgs, and ntend to find its companion Snarks and Boojums; the corresponding real and virtual sub-elementary particles.
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