Dump Quarks!

[Brian G Turner]

There was a letter in New Scientist I found really interesting - some good points raised.

Whether any of the objections are of any worth I'm not sure, but I guess I just like seeing paradigms challenged.

There's been a general friction between theoretical and practical physicists on this issue for a while, but this is porbably the most antagonistic reaction to the theory of quarks that I've seen.

Dump quarks

Your article on protons shows quite clearly that the standard model, after 40 years, still has not revealed the structure of these subatomic particles (3 May, p 34).

When is science going to give up on quarks as a lost cause? In retrospect, the quark model never has had any results to recommend it. The quark has failed miserably to answer the simplest questions about the proton, such as its mass, charge or magnetic moment. Worse, the theory has had to postulate unprecedented fractional charges, and envisages proton quarks as three thingies in a bag.

Following the discovery of a third "strange" quark, someone noticed that the bagged three quarks violated the Pauli exclusion principle. Theorists got around this by postulating quark colour forces called red, blue and green that combine instantaneously to form a colourless combination.

The fact that the quark model has consistently failed has resulted in the postulation of many such crazy "patches" to shore up the theory. For example, to hold the quarks together, gluons were postulated and given the unprecedented ability to be stronger at large distances and "asymptotically" free at short distances. And to explain our failure to detect quarks, it was postulated that if you break the gluon "strings", quarks form on the free ends.

The sad fact is that particle physicists are stuck with a very bad model, and seem content to maintain the status quo, just to feed their wives and kiddies.

Tom Lockyer
Los Altos, California, US

From New Scientist - letters