Quantum Mechanical?

Question

okay. i need to kno basicly everything.
in general. i need to know about quarks~~~who discovered them? when? what are they? how do they relate to an atom?....also i need to know about Murray Gell-Mann~who he is. and what he did and why he did it?.
and i need this in a basic view. nothing high tech. i have to teach it to my classmates. uh? also. any ideas on how to make a model of quantum mechanical?. thats a real stumper there!! thank you!

Answer 1

Wikipedia is the best place to get information on all of this stuff. They have an excellent science section.

www.wikipedia.org

Answer 2

Quarks are the particles that combine (three at a time) to form protons or neutrons, which in turn combine together to form atoms. Quarks are the most fundamental particle in nature; that is, you can't separate a quark into smaller parts. (There is one other kind of fundamental particle called a lepton).

There are many kinds of sub-atomic particles. Scientists kept discovering more and more in the 1900's. But there was no rhyme or reason for what the particles were like or how they were related to each other. Physicists started trying to think of a "model" that would explain all of these types of particles. Murray Gell-Mann was a scientist who proposed the "quark" model in the 1960's. At first, nobody knew if it was correct. But his model predicted that there should be a particle called an "omega minus," which had never been discovered. Some scientists decided to look for it, and guess what ... they found it! So now we believe that Gell-Mann was right. He won the Nobel Prize for that discovery.

Quarks are held together by a super-strong force and are never seen individually. So we can only study them indirectly, by studying neutrons, protons, and other particles that are made of quarks. But quark theory does a very good job of explaining how protons and neutrons behave. For example, a proton has an electric charge of +1, while a neutron has a charge of 0. Why? Because a proton is made of two "up" quarks (with a charge of 2/3 each) and a "down" quark (with a charge of -1/3). But a neutron is made of two down quarks and an up quark. This is a great exercise in fractions and negative numbers, if you have covered those in school. Check the arithmetic. You will see that it really works!

Gell-Mann taught at Caltech when I went to college there in the 1990's. I met him one time on a bus, on a field trip for Caltech's Centennial Banquet. He is known for being very serious and egotistical. When he made an astute observation on the bus, I said, "Yes, you are a smart guy." Everybody in the bus laughed ... except Murray.

Answer 3

www.particleadventure.org

Gell Mann was one of the originators of the quark model.

I would avoid wikipedia - you are unlikely to grasp its explanations unless you are well grounded in quantum mechanics. They are really rather poor for a non specialist audience.

Answer 4

Google it.