Word: flavorings
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What is modern particle physics--or, for that matter, Sheldon Glashow--all about? Glashow gives a pithy, if somewhat superficial account in the introduction to his Oct. 1, 1975 article in Scientific American, "Quarks with Color and Flavor." Glashow writes...
...story moves to Glashow's contribution, which came in 1964. Motivated by considerations of grace and elegance in theories which combined the electromagnetic force and a force called the "weak force" (to distinguish it from the "strong force"), Glashow and another physicist, James D. Bjorken, postulated an additional flavor of quark, and named it the "charmed" quark. Glashow writes in a New York Times article...
...case for charm--or the fourth quark--became much firmer when it was realized that there was a serious flaw in the familiar three-quark [flavor] theory, which predicted that "strange" particles would sometimes decay in ways that they did not. In an almost magical way, the existence of the charmed quark prohibits these unwanted and unseen decays, and brings the theory into agreement with experiment. Thus did my recent [1970] collaborators, John Iliopoulos, Luciano Maiani and I justify another definition of charm as a magical device to avert evil...
Glashow is currently examining the ways in which quarks combine to form elementary particles, a subject he calls "chromodynamics," an allusion to the "color" attributed to quarks. Actually, neither "color", "flavor," "charm," nor "strangeness" has any correlation to the common-sense meaning of the words. They are just ways of labeling the various attributes of quarks and could just as easily be called "beauty," "faith" or "hope...
Massive Betrayals. All this allusiveness nearly swamps Rosales' story. Moreover, Day often falls into a "Hey, meester" rendering of how Spanish might be written if it were English; the result sounds like Ricardo Montalban reading aloud from the works of Ernest Hemingway. By inserting (for flavor) so many Spanish words and (for sense) their English translations, Day sets up a rhythm with all the verve of a language primer. Characters talk as if they were constantly flipping back to the glossary to check their meanings...