Word: quarks
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...once called the great white whale of physics. The longer the "top" quark managed to elude capture, the more obsessed its pursuers became with the importance of hunting it down. For in the subatomic world, the top was, scientists believed, the sixth and last of the quarks -- pointlike particles that constitute the basic building blocks of matter. As the years passed, failure to find the top became a source of consternation and potential embarrassment to the theorists who swore it must exist...
Brandenburg said there was no single moment ofdiscovery because the data analysis accumulatedevidence for the top quark...
...paper released yesterday is based on ayear's worth of data collected by running theFermilab's accelerator at an energy of 17 billionelectron-volts. Top quark sightings during theyear, or "events" in physics jargon, generatederuptions of excitement among scientists, saidHuth, a self-dubbed "top godfather" in dataanalysis...
Huth said there to four times more data muststill be collected before the top quark'sexistence can be officially confirmed. Only whenthe particle's existence is completely assured canphysicists begin further research on the nature ofmatter in the universe, Huth said...
...Because the top [quark] is so massive, in asense it's like a keystone in a bridge," Huthsaid. "When you find this keystone and put it in,the whole structure all of a sudden becomesapparent. That gives you a window to do the newinteresting pieces of physics which you couldn'thave really understood without...