Word: quark
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PHYSICISTS WERE UNDERSTANDABLY overjoyed in 1994 when they discovered the top quark. At last, after 17 years of searching, they had found the sixth--and, according to the theorists, the last--of matter's tiniest, most fundamental building blocks. The most troublesome loose end in the so-called Standard Model of particle physics had been tidied...
...they thought. According to a report in the current Science, the same people who discovered the top quark may have inadvertently made a much more revolutionary discovery. Contrary to what physicists have believed for the past 30 years, quarks may not be the most basic units of matter after all. Although the results are highly preliminary, the possibility of so startling a conclusion has scientists scrambling for a more conventional explanation for what they're seeing...
...Tevatron is so powerful that it can probe the structure within quarks themselves--structure that had, until now, been presumed not to exist. If, as it seems, there really is something lurking inside the quark, the whole Standard Model may have to be trashed. And subatomic physics may suddenly become a lot more interesting than even its practitioners suspected...
Professor of Physics Melissa Franklin, who was among those who confirmed the existence of the top quark, will give the primary address
...ordinary matter, physicists had learned, was made of four basic particles: electrons, neutrinos and two kinds of quarks. But there was another family of particles, plentiful in the early universe but now found almost exclusively in nuclear accelerators, that seemed to be divided into the same four types: the muon (a sort of heavy electron), the muon neutrino and two more quarks. And in 1976, Stanford University physicist Martin Perl announced he had found a third, even heavier electron, which he dubbed the tau--a discovery that earned him the other half of this year's physics Nobel. Perl...