Thanks to the sciences of physics and chemistry and biology, etc., we know so much about the universe. And yet there is still so much to learn. Even basic stuff.
Talking physics here — in the domain where the Large Hadron Collider could prove a useful tool — just what are the most basic elements of the universe, at least those we can know about? What is mass? Time and space: are these elements and events of the universe itself, or relations of these, descriptive only? I, for one, want to know.
The recent ScienceDaily article, Elusive Masses of Up, Down and Strange Quarks Pinned Down, got me thinking. And it didn’t get me thinking that Lewis Carrol must be alive and well, working as a particle physicist. Well, maybe a little.
Although much of this type of physics is rabbit-hole material to me, a couple paragraphs especially intrigued me:
Quarks have an astonishingly wide range of masses. The lightest is the up quark, which is 470 times lighter than a proton. The heaviest, the t quark, is 180 times heavier than a proton — or almost as heavy as an entire atom of lead.
“So why these huge ratios between masses? This is one of the big mysteries in theoretical physics right now,” Lepage said. “Indeed it is unclear why quarks have mass at all.” He added that the new Large Hadron Collider in Geneva was built to address this question.
“It is unclear why quarks have mass at all . . . ” That says it. We still live in a world with the atom half-empty. And what a colorfully intriguing place it is.
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