Quarks

When you’re a kid, you’re told that all the stuff around you is made of atoms and that atoms are made of protons and neutrons and electrons. And if you’re lucky you’re told what protons and neutrons are made of they’re made of three quarks eat, but if they’re both made of quarks, how are protons and neutrons different you’re not usually told this is a kid and you’re not usually told what quarks are and why they’re called quarks when they’re clearly spelled quarks. So protons are made out of three quarks. That’s the first lie. You’re told protons are not that At any given time the proton will have two up quarks with charge plus 2/3 and a down Quark with charge minus the third which of course all add up to positive one because that’s the charge of the proton. These three quarks are known as valence quarks and they’re definitely there but the proton could have an additional up Quark anti up Quark pair. An anti Quark is the antiparticle of a cork and it could have other types of quarks pairs of strange quarks and anti strange quarks charm quarks and antiquarks. In fact, the proton likely has tons of quark antiquark Pairs, but there’s more the quarks are held together by the strong force, which is carried by particles called gluons. So inside the proton there is zillions of gluons and quarks all zooming around close to the speed of light and colliding and annihilating and new ones are forming and it’s a crazy raging party such as the quantum World in a proton wouldn’t that violate some kind of conservation law of particles just appeared in the proton quarks can and do just appear and disappear but not out of nothing Einstein’s famous equation E equals MC squared means

Mass can turn into a lot of energy or a lot of energy can turn into mass. In fact, the quarks that comprise the proton only make up one percent of the total mass of that proton. That’s like saying I drop some quarters in a bag and suddenly it weighs 10 pounds. There is a lot of energy and all the motion of those crazy partying particles particles and there’s energy in the gluon field all of this energy contributes to the mass of the proton E equals MC squared. All we need to conserve is the total Mass energy of the proton and nothing is violated as Quark anti Quark pairs pop in and out of existence, but there are a few other constraints the total number of up quarks must be two more than the anti up quarks and there must be one more down Quark than anti down quarks so that the valence quarks come to a total of three and the Quark antiquark pairs of other types Must ALL cancel out like the top quark and the charm quark and the strange quark and the bottom cork when Quark pairs spontaneously appear in the proton other properties must be conserved as well like charge.

So for cork with charge positive 2/3 appears its partner must have charged negative 2/3 and the spin of the particles must be opposite and the colorlessness of the proton must be conserved. This is cool quarks all have color except it’s not like real color color and quarks is a type of charge like the electric charge except instead of the electromagnetic force. It corresponds to the strong force Works can be red green and blue like the three primary colors of light and when you mix those colors you get white light. So when I said that protons are colorless that Means that there are three valence quarks must be red blue and gray so clever the quarks can change color but the overall color has to stay white. It turns out that the anti Quark has the opposite color. So that would be like anti-red which cancels out red, but I think the most amazing thing about quarks is that we know all of this about them without ever directly detecting one. In fact, you can never detect this one because they’re never found alone. The more you separate the quarks the more energy you have to put in to pull the quarks apart and as you do so

You eventually put in enough energy to make up the mass of two new quarks that can then bind to the original to so next time you’re told there are three quarks in a proton. Hmm. There are three valence quarks and a sea of other quarks too many to count impossible to count. No really we can’t like take a snapshot