Word: quark
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Imagine an infinitesimal particle that is as heavy as a large atom and less tangible than a shadow. For 15 years, hundreds of physicists have been chasing such an improbable phantom. Their quarry is the top quark, the sole missing member of a family of subatomic particles that form the basic building blocks of matter. Of six types of quarks that are believed to exist, five have already been discovered. "The top," says Harvard University theorist Sheldon Glashow, "is not just another quark. It's the last blessed one, and the sooner we find it, the better everyone will feel...
Physicists will celebrate because the top is the absent jewel in the crown of the so-called Standard Model, a powerful theoretical synthesis that has reduced a once bewildering zoo of particles to just a few fundamental constituents, including three whimsically named couplets of quarks. Up and down quarks combine to create everyday protons and neutrons, while charm and strange quarks make up more esoteric particles, the kind produced by accelerators and high-energy cosmic rays. In 1977 physicists discovered a fifth quark they dubbed bottom, and they have been looking for its partner, top, ever since. Not finding...
Theorists have already deduced that the top quark is heavier than any known particle. "A single top quark," exclaims Fermilab physicist Alvin Tollestrup, "probably weighs at least as much as a whole silver atom does." (With an atomic weight of 108, a silver atom is made up of hundreds of up and down quarks.) Exactly how much top quarks weigh is a question scientists are anxious to answer, but first they must find some to measure -- a task considerably complicated by the fact that in nature these massive but ethereal entities made only a cameo appearance, just after...
...scientists search for the next planet, the "top quark" and more effective vaccines, they often need also to search for new words to describe their findings. And while some of their etymological innovations, like "DNA," are incorporated into daily usage, most are as incomprehensible to the non-Ph.D today as they were the day they were coined...
Huth is currently attempting a high precision measurement of the sixth or "top" quark, thought to be the last undiscovered part of the atom...