If Dorothy was a quark, where would she call home? A proton. But first, what are quarks? No, it’s not the cries of a duck-shark love child; it’s one type of matter particle postulated by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig that constitute protons, neutrons and their related heavy particles. In fact, almost all matter you and I lay our peepers on daily, is composed of these precious particles, and on a deeper level than we’ve been able to previously see, never mind try and wrap our heads around.
If you take yourself back to high school chemistry/physics, you may remember protons carry a positive charge (+1), electrons negative (-1) and the aptly named, neutron is neutral (0). But not quarks. Quarks are the hipsters of the subatomic scene: they have the strange characteristic of having a fractional electric charge, and an even more foreign (to us, not the Universe) colour charge. Now to introduce hadrons…
Hadrons are any composite particles made of the aforementioned quarks, with each boasting its particle plumage of corresponding quark-anti-quarks, gluons and other peculiar-sounding sciencey words. When Gell-Man and Zweig proposed the quark model in 1964, along with it came the calling for a classification system for the hadron family, so in the late 1960s, Jerome Friedman started bombarding hydrogen targets using Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre’s new high-energy electron beam. Basically, this meant studying inelastic collisions whereby the proton actually absorbs some kinetic energy from the electron internally and BAMN, of it blows apart!
His bright astronaut theorist James Bjorke contemporary observed complementary scattering results (the number of electrons detected at a given angle as a result of the proton’s and electron’s kinetic interaction) around the same, with the ladies and Caltech’s favourite Richard Feynman, concluding that because of special relativity, an electron that is travelling near-on the speed of light, would see a stationary proton flattened into a pancake-shaped object.
So, thanks to the findings published in the two 1969 papers by Friedman and his partner particle pros, we now know that there were three particles inside the proton, so you and I can rest easy tonight. As with many phenomenal scientific findings, it didn’t “really come into its own until post-Feynman”, remarks Bjorken, yet Friedman still hails Bjorken the “unsung hero” of the quarkian-protonion-neutronion particle mystery.
Keep On, Questioning On – T.Raynes
