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Quantum mechanics
The most basic building blocks of particles that scientists have found yet. They come in different kinds and “colors,” which combine to form the particles in an atom.
Quark Quotes in A Brief History of Time
The A Brief History of Time quotes below are all either spoken by Quark or refer to Quark. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 5 Quotes
We now know that neither the atoms nor the protons and neutrons within them are indivisible. So the question is: what are the truly elementary particles, the basic building blocks from which everything is made?
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Humans will keep digging for the answers behind the answers. After finding the atom, scientists found the proton and neutron, which form the nucleus of the atom. But that was not far enough. Scientists also found that these smaller particles were composed of quarks, as well as the characteristics of these even smaller particles. This particular search is symptomatic of humanity’s deeper longing for a greater understanding of the universe, everything in it, and how it all works. It seems scientists will not stop digging until the final answers, to everything, are found and understood.
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Quark Term Timeline in A Brief History of Time
The timeline below shows where the term Quark appears in A Brief History of Time. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 5
In the mid 1900s, Murray Gell-Mann discovered quarks and won the Nobel Prize for his work on them. There are six “flavors” of...
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...gluon, a particle of spin 1, carries this strong nuclear force and interacts only with quarks and itself. This force exhibits confinement, meaning all types of particles that create a structure...
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How humans beings came to be is possibly due to the reverse process—the production of quarks and protons. If there were regions of anti-matter (made of anti-particles), there would be a...
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...cools, forces that do not obey the symmetry of T cause more anti-electrons to become quarks than electrons to become anti-quarks, creating the matter we see today. Of course, they are...
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Chapter 11
...new phenomena to explore, and they may well find a new layer of particles beyond quarks. But gravity might limit this otherwise infinite series of discoveries as we achieve higher energy...
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