Quarks

 I actually did study quarks in high-school chemistry, but that was so long ago, I thought I’d take another look at them. And, no, I’m not talking about the bar owner on Deep Space 9; my high school days were long before that particular TV show came along.

I’m very glad to report that what I learned in high school chemistry is still true, that a quark is a fundamental piece of matter, making up protons and neutrons, the things that make up atomic nuclei in all matter.

Quarks have various properties; electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They also are the only elementary particles that experience all 4 fundamental interactions; electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction and weak interaction.

There are 6 types of quarks, known as flavors. These are up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. (My personal favorite flavor is lime green with orange polka dots, but that flavor hasn’t been discovered yet.)

The up and down quarks have the lowest mass. The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through a process of particle decay, the transformation from a higher mass state to a lower mass state. This generally makes the up and down quarks the most stable and the most common in the universe.

For every quark flavor, there is an equal but opposite antiquark. Yes, the antiquark differs from its corresponding quark in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign.

As my high school teacher said, quarks are strange little things. They have a fractional electric charge value of either -1/3 or +2/3 of the elementary charge, depending on their flavor. Those with +2/3 e include the up, charm and top quarks, while the rest have -1/3 e. Antiquarks, of course, have an opposite charge to their corresponding quarks; the up, charm and top antiquarks have charges of -2/3 e, and the other antiquarks have a charge of +1/3 e.

In the atomic nuclei, Neutrons have no electrical charge, because they are made of 2 down quarks (-1/3 e each) and 1 up quark (+2/3 e). Similarly, the proton has a positive charge of 1e, because they are made up of 2 up quarks (+2/3 e each) and 1 down quark (-1/3 e).

So, I learned some new stuff about quarks, couldn’t make sense of other stuff in the article. May have to consider getting a new chemistry textbook, or maybe a textbook on particle physics. And then find the time to actually study it.

Oh, I did see that quarks have a color (red, green and blue), as well as a flavor, but alas, still no lime green with orange polka dots. I’m sure they’ll show up eventually.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark

Head Wrapping

Have you ever tried to understand something, but you just couldn’t quite understand it? Maybe you hadn’t had enough caffeine yet that particular day, or there were too many squirrels playing outside your window, but the facts as they were presented did not make sense to you.

It happened to me with math. In high school, as a junior, I took Algebra II, where we studied (among other concepts), how to graph equations, and that took us into the realm of sin and co-sin, tangent and co-tangent. As a senior, I took Trigonometry, which dealt with polar graph and other stuff. Then I started college, taking Calculus I, and were back to sin and co-sin, but there wasn’t any refresher week to wake up those memories, we just shot off in a whole new direction, and I simply could not wrap my head around any of it.

It happened again today when I thought I would look up ‘quantum entanglement’ and see if I could try to simplify it enough to write a quick blog. The results?

My tummy hurts.

I’m also hungry for cake, and maybe an explanation for that will come in a little bit.

The first article I read was going to ‘simplify’ the concept of  entanglement, and I think it tried too hard. It wanted me to imagine I had 2 cakes. (Hence my hunger for cake.) The cakes were either round or square, either red or blue. In a normal state, you could look at one cake, see its shape and color, but you wouldn’t know anything about the other cake. Let’s say you have a red round cake. The other cake could be red or blue, round or square. You wouldn’t know.

Ahh, but IF the cakes were entangled, you could know that if the first cake was round, the 2nd cake would also be round. But you wouldn’t know anything about the color of either cake, because in the realm of quantum physics, you can’t know everything. Apparently.

Then he moved into round and red being good but square and blue was evil... and I was totally lost. Cake is evil? Never! I don’t care how bad it is for me.

The 2nd article I tried to read was even worse. Not because it tried too hard to simplify the concept, but because it didn’t seem to simplify at all. Or maybe my head was spinning, trying to get a grip on the idea of evil blue square cakes.

So I’ve retreated from the battle, so to speak. I kind of half-way understand the idea of entanglement, but I just can’t wrap my head around the entire concept. I’ve been here, more or less this exact spot, for a number of years. Someday, if I last long enough, I’ll go out and look for another simplified explanation of entanglement.

When I do, I’ll make sure I’ve had enough caffeine, and I’ll close the curtains to keep the squirrels from distracting me.