Word: quark
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Physicists think six types of quarks are the building blocks of all the particles within atomic nuclei. They had found the first five by 1977, and now the top quark, the sixth and heaviest, has been identified at Fermilab, near Chicago. It took 440 scientists to spot the top, which disintegrates in an infinitesimal fraction of a second...
...last quark conclusively identified was the bottom quark in 1977, sparking a race among scientists to find its partner...
...seeming paradox, the mass of the top quark is nearly 200 times that of a proton. As a result scientists have likened this experiment to smashing together two tennis balls and finding a bowling ball in their place...
Scientists were reluctant to call the results a conclusive discovery although there is only a.25 percent chance that the data was caused by non-top quark phenomena...
...Because the top [quark] is so massive, in a sense it's like a keystone in a bridge," Huth said. "When you find this keystone and put it in, the whole structure all of a sudden becomes apparent. That gives you a window to do the new interesting pieces of physics which you couldn't have really understood without...