Quark Best Quotes

What, according to our best physical theories, is nothing? What would the world be like if there were no electrons, no quarks, no photons?

For our story, the most important proposed expansion of the equations of physics is supersymmetry, often fondly called SUSY. Supersymmetry, as the name suggests, proposes that we should use equations with larger symmetry. SUSY's new symmetry is related to the boost symmetry of special relativity. As you may recall, boost symmetry says that the basic equations don't change when you impart a common, constant velocity to all the components of the system you're describing. (Dirac had to modify Schrodinger's equation to give it that property.) Supersymmetry likewise says that the equations don't change when you impart a common motion to all the components of the system you're describing. But it's a very different kind of motion from what's involved in boost symmetry. Instead of motion through ordinary space with a constant velocity, supersymmetry involves motion into new dimensions! Before you get carried away with visions of spirit worlds and wormholes through hyperspace, let me hasten to add that the new dimensions have a very different character from the familiar dimensions of space and time. They're quantum dimensions. What happens to a body when it moves in the quantum dimensions isn't that it gets displace-there's no notion of distance out there-instead, its spin changes. The "superboosts" turn particles with a given amount of intrinsic spin into particles with a different amount of spin. Because the equations are supposed to stay the same, supersymmetry relates properties of particles with different spin. SUSY allows us to see them as the same particle, moving in different ways through the quantum dimensions of superspace. You can visualize the quantum dimensions as new layers of the Grid. When a particle hops into these layers its spin changes, and so does its mass. Its charges-electric, color, and weak-stay the same. SUSY might allow us to complete the work of unifying the Core. Unification of the different charges, using the symmetry SO(10), united all the gauge bosons into a common cluster, and all the quarks and leptons into a common cluster. But no ordinary symmetry is capable of joining those two clusters, for they describe particles with different spins. Sypersymmetry is the best idea we have for connecting them.

At Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, and at several other centers around the world, there are special rooms where people rarely tread. Nothing much seems to be happening in these rooms, there's no visible motion, and the only sound is the gently whir of fans that keep the temperature steady and the humidity low. In these rooms, roughly 10^30 protons and neutrons are at work. They have been organized into hundreds of computers, harnessed to work in parallel. The team races at teraflop rates, which means 10^12- a million million-FLoating point OPerations per second. We let them labor for months-10^7 seconds. At the end , they've done what a single proton does every 10^-24 second, which is figure out how to orchestrate quark and gluon fields in the best possible way so that they keep the Grid satisfied and make a stable equilibrium.

dark matter is probably all around us. The problem is that it plays by different physical rules than ordinary matter. All the subatomic elementary particles which make up ordinary matter—you know, the leptons and quarks, et cetera—they’re all bound together by the strong nuclear force. The candidate particles for dark matter are called WIMPs.” “Physicists come up with the best names.” She smiled. “Well, it’s a field dominated by men. It stands for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. Like ordinary matter these WIMPs have mass, they’re acted on by the exceedingly faint force of gravity, but because they don’t obey strong nuclear forces they almost never interact or collide with ordinary matter.