a look at the proton, Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news109934029.html

http://www.physorg.com/news109934029.html

The article mentions seperating a quark (is shot out of)from the proton. Maybe Im a bit behind the current developments but I always remember the quarks as being inseperable. Or maybe that dosnt fit in with the thesis?

AR

At very high collision energies the constituents of the composite particles can be briefly examined. Quarks don't last long, even at those energies, but their interactions with 'normal' matter can be observed as a jet of hadrons in the detector. I have as reference an admittedly dated, but not inappropriate article from the February, 1991, Scientific American, "The Number of Families of Matter", that gives a good layman's explanation.

A good thing it's for a layman, too...

You can pull a quark free from a proton, but by definition, you can't pull a quark free from QCD. The peculiar consequence of this is when you push on a quark hard enough, quark-anti-quark pairs are formed, and the "free quark" is actually bound in a meson or hadron.

O! Lord, I forgot about that. Would you be kind enough to point us at an article or two for a layman's refresher? That explains the hadron shower, eh?

This post has been edited by Sapo on Sep 25 2007, 11:40 PM

2 hadrons are shot out and each of these two are made of 2 quarks each, so, there are no loose quarks quarking around in the bubble bath!

I think the bubbles in your bath are something else. Maybe you should confine yourself to quork, Rorschach. Less gas than regular cheese, I've heard

Edit:

My sincere apology. I should not have attacked without more knowledge. The atmosphere here has become cloudy and dim lately, and I reacted with without thought. I will endeavor to respond, instead.

I attempt humor, too, so please keep it up!

D

This post has been edited by Sapo on Sep 26 2007, 01:14 AM

From a purely layman's point of view this sounds as if the proton is made up of very many smaller constituent parts, which would beg the question why is there a limit to their size (and guess where I am going now) could it be that the number is controlled by cubic values and not quarks at all. and that the quark concept was brought about by incorrect interpretation of collision experiments? If cubic values were required to hold the structure together surely this would explain the absurdities of so many short lived particles and why also it has been shown that while larger particles can be produced there lifetime is incredibly short on our time scales.

AR