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Article

Quarkways to particle symmetry

FEB 01, 1966
Each time physicists think they’ve found the fundamental building blocks of matter, they discover that the blocks themselves have a structure. Now it seems that the blocks may be quarks—with three different kinds you can build all known mesons and baryons and fit them into symmetrical arrangements of 8 or 10 particles.
Laurie M. Brown

WHEN THE EDITORS OF PHYSICS TODAY asked me—or, better, challenged me—to write an article explaining unitary particle symmetries to physicists who are not fundamental‐particle specialists, I hesitated. But on considering the physicist whose children may ask, “Daddy, what are fundamental particles made of?”, I decided to write the article after all. That question—so innocent, so clear, so full of healthy curiosity—deserves to be answered, as far as possible, on the same level.

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More about the authors

Laurie M. Brown, Northwestern University.

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This Content Appeared In
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Volume 19, Number 2

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