Quarks..weird,cute particles of awe !

Quarks are one type of matter particle. Most of the matter we see around us is made from protons and neutrons, which are composed of quarks.

There are six quarks, but physicists usually talk about them in terms of three pairs: up/down, charm/strange, and top/bottom. (Also, for each of these quarks, there is a corresponding antiquark.) Be glad that quarks have such silly names -- it makes them easier to remember!

Quarks have the unusual characteristic of having afractional electric charge, unlike the proton and electron, which have integer charges of +1 and -1 respectively. Quarks also carry another type of charge called color charge

In order to make their calculations work, the quarks had to be assigned fractional electrical charges of 2/3 and -1/3. Such charges had never been observed before. Quarks are never observed by themselves, and so initially these quarks were regarded as mathematical fiction. Experiments have since convinced physicists that not only do quarks exist, but there are six of them, not three.

How did quarks get their silly names?

There are six flavors of quarks. "Flavors" just means different kinds. The two lightest are called up and down

The third quark is called strange. It was named after the "strangely" long lifetime of the K particle, the first composite particle found to contain this quark.

The fourth quark type, the charm quark, was named on a whim. It was discovered in 1974 almost simultaneously at both the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The fifth and sixth quarks were sometimes called truth and beauty in the past, but even physicists thought that was too cute.

The bottom quark was first discovered at Fermi National Lab (Fermilab) in 1977, in a composite particle called Upsilon 

The top quark was discovered last, also at Fermilab, in 1995. It is the most massive quark. It had been predicted for a long time but had never been observed successfully until then.

Quantum Suicide-- never ever die !

           A man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. This is no ordinary gun; i­t's rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle -- or quark -- is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If the quark is spinning counterclockwise, the gun won't go off. There'll only be a click.

            Nervously, the man takes a breath and pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. He pulls the trigger again. Click. And again: click. The man will continue to pull the trigger again and again with the same result: The gun won't fire. Although it's functioning properly and loaded with bullets, no matter how many times he pulls the trigger, the gun will never fire. He'll continue this process for eternity, becoming immortal.

            Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. The man pulls the trigger for the very first time, and the quark is now measured as spinning clockwise. The gun fires. The man is dead.

But, wait. The man already pulled the trigger the first time -- and an infinite amount of times following that -- and we already know the gun didn't fire. How can the man be dead? The man is unaware, but he's both alive and dead. Each time he pulls the trigger, the universe is split in two. It will continue to split, again and again, each time the trigger is pulled

                               This thought experiment is called quantum suicide. Cool huh? isn't it?