Word: quark
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...years ago, in an effort to bring order to this subatomic chaos, Physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, both now at Caltech, in dependently dreamed up strange elemental particles-out of which all the others could be constructed. Gell-Mann emphasized that the particles, which he whimsically dubbed quarks, were only theoretical tools, mathematical concoctions that probably did not really exist outside his equations. Yet other physicists took the quark quite seriously, and have been hunting for it ever since...
...Particles. Last week, for the first time, there was evidence that the hunters were closing in on their quarry. At a conference of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics in Budapest, a scientist from Australia announced that he was "99% sure" that he had actually found a quark. British-born Physicist Charles McCusker, 50, reported that his team of investigators had apparently spotted the elusive particles among the wreckage of atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen atoms smashed when they were struck by cosmic rays hurtling down from space...
Argonne National Laboratory physicists have also examined iron meteor ites, air and sea water in a vain attempt to find quarks that had combined with stable atoms. Instead of being electrically neutral, they reasoned, such atoms would have fractional charges imparted by the quarks-enabling scientists to separate them out in an electric field and analyze them. Because quarks would more likely combine with heavier atoms, one scientist has suggested looking for quark-bearing atoms in oysters, which tend to concentrate the heavier elements in the seas...
...Miles Up. Arguing that others may have been quark hunting in the wrong places, British Physicists J. B. Hasted and M.R.C. McDowell have suggested a new area of search. As quarks rain down on the earth, the British scientists suggest in their Nature article, those with a negative charge combine with oxygen in the ocean to form fractionally charged quark-oxygen atoms. When the quark-oxygen atoms are carried into the air during the normal evaporation and precipitation cycle, they are repelled by the atmospheric electrical field, which extends some 30 miles above the earth's surface...
Hasted and McDowell propose to capture the quark-oxygen atom by launching a Venus's-flytrap rocket that would open its jaws at an altitude of 30 miles, adsorb the oxygen atoms on an activated charcoal surface and bring them back to earth. Any oxygen atoms combined with quarks could then be identified by examining the sample with a mass spectrometer, which would separate them out because of their odd mass and fractional charge...