Book 13 - "Quarks" Harald Fritzsch

"Quarks, The Stuff Of Matter" Harald Fritzsch (Pelican)





This in a straightforward, mostly jargon free, introduction to the discovery of quarks, the most fundamental elementary particles, the matter that make up the atom. Without too much mathematics the author outlines the discovery of the flavours that these third charge particles come in.

Gell-Mann and Zweig postulated a new level of matter beneath the nucleon, elementary strongly-interacting component particles on par with the electron. Extrapolating from the knowledge base acquired from the recently-formulated QED, in combination with all the other quantum-mechanical paraphernalia (exclusion principle, uncertainty principle, virtual particle pairs, vacuum polarization, a new theory of matter was deduced to explain the volumes of new data generated by the experimentalists.

Then in the 1960s came the momentous results from the SLAC electron accelerator -- deep inelastic scattering. Lo and behold, there indeed did seem to be tiny, hard objects swirling around inside the proton an

One of the most fascinating aspects of this story as told by Fritzsch is the origin of the notion of quark colour. At first, they conceived it only as a necessity in order to avoid violation of the Pauli exclusion (I think the omega ?). This is disallowed, so they invented a new property, "color", simply to avoid this uncomfortable situation. Later, however, the colour concept came into its own as an explanation for the binding force between quarks (origin of the familiar strong force), and further went on to explain the absence of free quarks - quark confinement. This is a stunning example of a purely theoretical construction accounting neatly for entirely unanticipated phenomena.

This book tells the story from the viewpoint of a pioneering quark theorist. This type of discovery is quite unlikely to ever again occur in physics. Just one caveat, the paperback dates back to the eighties (actually 1981) , and since then we know a lot more about the strange world of the quark.