[Fis] Cho 2016 The social life of quarks

[Bob Logan]

Stan et al - you honour me by asking the question. We know that matter (and here I do not include dark matter or dark energy) is made up of a small number of quarks and gluons. As we go higher and higher energy we will continue to create these "freaks of nature" freaks in the sense that we create the conditions for them to come into existence using our high energy colliders. I am sure they sometimes occur naturally in stars from time to time but they do not have any long term effects - they are a passing fancy, a novelty, and an amusing one at that. Perhaps they will help us understand the quark gluon interaction. The analogy I see with the transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes that I sent to Malcolm was my indulging in scientific based poetry. BTW I teach an undergrad course since 1971 called the Poetry of Physics (also the title of a book available on Amazon) to teach physics to humanities students without using math to promote science literacy among humanists.

Another analogy that came to mind was that of proliferation of nucleic acids made up of the same 4 elements: C, G, A, and T.  They are the quarks of biology and their chemical bonds the gluons.  

Metaphorically your - Bob Logan
______________________

Robert K. Logan
Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto 
Fellow University of St. Michael's College
Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications

On 2016-01-16, at 10:33 AM, Stanley N Salthe wrote:

> One way to complicate anything is to smash it into bits.  I wonder, Bob, if you would comment on this point as a former particle physicist!
> 
> STAN
> 
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 11:13 PM, Malcolm Dean <malcolmdean at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes. I don't know enough about Biology, but I noticed the 3+2 business some time ago. I'm automatically suspicious of theories which are "vexingly complex" (QCD) and only "beautiful" (String Theory) to a few people with certain math backgrounds. But the Two and the Three have been important to humans for thousands of years. I think Nature is actually very simple, but we get overwhelmed and confused by its enormous scales and by our attempts to manage observation by (necessarily) creating over-simplified Objects.
> 
> M.
> 
> Malcolm Dean
> Member, Higher Cognitive Affinity Group, BRI
> Research Affiliate, Human Complex Systems, UCLA
> Member, BAFTA/LA
> On Google Scholar
> 
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Bob Logan <logan at physics.utoronto.ca> wrote:
> eukaryote came about by two prokaryotes joining together and 5 quark combo can be thought of as a nucleon (3 quarks) and a meson(2quarks) combining and the 4 quqrk state as 2 mesons combining. By this logic perhaps there will be  6 quark beast if 2 nucleons combine.
> 
> 
> On 2016-01-15, at 4:17 PM, Malcolm Dean wrote:
> 
>> Could you specify the relata?
>> 
>> Malcolm
>> 
>> On Jan 15, 2016 5:31 AM, "Bob Logan" <logan at physics.utoronto.ca> wrote:
>> Hi Malcolm - thanks for this article that supports my notion that my former field of particle physics is becoming like biology. The 4 and 5 quark combos represent an analogy of the transition in biology from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. :-) - Bob
>> 
>> 
>> On 2016-01-14, at 7:39 PM, Malcolm Dean wrote:
>> 
>>> http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6270/217.summary
>>> Science 351(6270):217-219, 15 January 2016; DOI: 10.1126/science.351.6270.217
>>> The social life of quarks
>>> Adrian Cho
>>> 
>>> Particle physicists at Europe's CERN laboratory in Switzerland say they have observed bizarre new cousins of the protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nucleus. Protons and neutrons consist of other particles called quarks, bound by the strong nuclear force. By smashing particles at high energies, physicists have blasted into fleeting existence hundreds of other quark-containing particles. Until recently, all contained either two or three quarks. But since 2014, researchers working with CERN's Large Hadron Collider have also spotted four- and five-quark particles. Such tetraquarks and pentaquarks could require physicists to rethink their understanding of quantum chromodynamics, or they could have less revolutionary implications. Researchers hope that computer simulations and more collider studies will reveal how the oddball newcomers are put together, but some wonder whether experiments will ever provide a definitive answer.
>>> 
>>> ...
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