I recently read that Quarks were originally going to be named “partons” (it would have fit well with protons, electrons, neutrons, bosons, leptons, mesons, etc.) after singer Dolly Parton, but Mr. Murray Gell-Mann changed his mind and went with quarks after seeing the word in a poem.
Is this true?
well, nothing on the “partons”
but for the origin of quark, something close to my heart.
The chronology doesn’t work. Quarks were named in 1963. Dolly Parton was 17 then and no yet famous.
I wrote:
> . . . no yet famous.
I meant:
> . . . not yet famous.
Quarks were first postulated by Murry Gell-Mann in 1964. Partons were first postulated by Richard Feynman a few years later (the first printed use in the OED is from 1969). The “part” part is derived from “particle”. I remember reading somewhere that Gell-Mann was a little miffed that Feynman took so long to admit that partons and quarks are really the same thing.
I suppose it’s possible Feynman was influenced by the name of Dolly Parton. She had nine top-40 hits on the country charts between Feb. 1967 and the OED’s first citation in June 1969.
Muad’Dib, are you reading Bill Brysons new book “A Short History of Nearly Everything”?
Page 147, says that Richard Feynman wanted to call “these new basic particles (quarks) partons, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled.”
Not sure how true this is - Bryson is very funny and entertaining, however elsewhere in the book he perpetrates the myth of ‘flowing glass in windowpanes’.
What would Quark the Ferengi bartender say?
It would fit better with “bosoms”…
Technically, a “parton” isn’t necessarily a quark; rather, it’s any strongly interacting particle inside of a hadron or meson (the best-known hadrons are the neutron and the proton; the best-known meson is the pion.) So high-energy physicists will use the phrase “parton distribution” to denote the structure of the “real” quarks inside a hadron/meson, as well as the gluons that these particles are exchanging and the “virtual” quarks that are flitting in and out of existence.
Roughly speaking.
Could you elaborate on that, since the Master believes in that “myth”?
Look at the orders of magnitude. 5% in 10 million years. Given a 3 mm pane of glass, this would be about 150 micrometers. In 10 million years. In 300 years this would be about 4.5 nanometers.
Nitpick: Protons and neutrons are examples of baryons, pions are mesons, and both baryons and mesons (and some more hypothetical particles) are examples of hadrons. Hadrons are anything that’s held together by the strong force, which boils down to anything made out of quarks.
It appears that the first time Feynman used the word “parton” was in a notebook entry dated 19th June 1968. He began talking about them publically at SLAC in August and the term became rapidly widely known thereafter.
Whether partons were just another name for quarks was something people seem to have argued about right from the start. But Feynman was quite insistent that they weren’t necessarily quarks - they were just some unknown pointlike part inside a hadron. They might be identifiable with quarks or they might be the quanta of some unknown field theory. In the long run this nuance was justified, since MikeS is correct that it eventually turned out that gluons could be partons as well.
The origins of the name were thus rather informal - in June the parton model was only a vague idea he was playing with in a notebook. Once it was realised that it can explain the scattering data at SLAC, I suppose he could have tried to substitute something a bit less haphazard. But I suspect the informality of the origins being part-on may have appealed to him in contrast to Gell-Mann’s highfaluting fuss over the name for quarks. The latter, of course, took to referring to them as “put-ons”.
As for Dolly, I have heard it suggested once or twice as a joke amongst particle physicists that the two of them had had an affair, hence the name.
please excuse the hijack
Bryson was saying that the reason for thicker glass at the bottom of old panes was due to flow, rather than because the glaziers put the naturally thicker end down in the first place. Apparently glass flows, but by only by bees dick.