Word: quarks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...number of scientists had previously suggested cosmic rays as an ideal weapon to use in the quark hunt. If one of these high-speed bits of matter struck an atomic particle, they calculated, its tremendous energy would accomplish what no man-made atom smasher can do: split that particle into its constituent quarks. A particle with an energy of 200 billion electron volts, for example, might be enough to pry apart the three tightly bound quarks that theoretically constitute a proton. But a machine that can supply such energy will not be available until the AEC completes its giant accelerator...
Unwilling to wait, McCusker's team set up a more simple quark trap in a shed behind the University of Sydney's school of physics. Whenever Geiger counters detected a cosmic shower, they triggered four Wilson cloud chambers, which show the path of any ionized or charged particle that passes through them as a trail of condensed water drop lets. If a quark freed by a collision between a cosmic ray and an atmospheric atom happened to penetrate the cham ber, the physicists reasoned, it would leave a highly characteristic track...
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...