November 10 - Charmed Quark Day

nPosted on November 10, 2019

Key points

nYou can’t see atoms, but their existence explains SO MUCH, so you accept that they really exist.

nYou can’t see the parts of an atom – the protons, neutrons, and electrons – but their existence explains SO SO MUCH, so you accept that they really exist.

nYou can’t see the parts of protons and neutrons – quarks – but their existence explains SO SO SO MUCH, you really should accept that they truly do exist!

Two up quarks and one down quark make a proton, and two down quarks and one up quark make a neutron. But there are all these other quarks, too – which were first predicted because they make sense mathematically, and which were only later discovered using particle accelerators.

Making teensy-weensy particles go REALLY fast (like 99.997% of the speed of light) and then smashing them together helps us understand the universe more because – even though temperatures, speeds, and energies like the ones inside particle accelerators are way unfamiliar to us average humans – they are definitely known in the universe.

nStars exploding, the Big Bang, quasars, and cosmic rays are all examples that match or beat the extreme conditions in our accelerators.

nToday is Charmed Quark Day because two different research groups discovered evidence of its existence, around this date in 1976. As I mentioned before, this quark had already been suggested by theory.

nCharm or charmed quark is sort of a buddy to strange quark – I love these names so much! – just as up and down are buddies, and top and bottom are buddies. Quarks and leptons (like electrons) make up matter; bosons (like the gluons that “glue” together quarks and the photons that make up light and X-rays and radio waves) are called “force carriers.”