# Wait a minute! Quarks don't exist?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [October 3, 2019, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219 "2019-10-03T19:13:59Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2019, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/1 "2019-10-03T19:13:59Z")
So posits an article in [New Scientist](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332500-900-what-the-quark-why-matters-most-basic-building-blocks-may-not-exist/) which is annoyingly behind a paywall so I’m unsure whether it’s the same argument used in [this piece.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329715575_Quarks_Do_Not_Exist_Everything_is_made_up_of_only_positrons_and_electrons). Irrespective of that this stuff is way over my head anyway but the argument seems to be that it’s all protons and neutrons and it’s quite unnecessary to introduce something called a quark, for which he says there is no evidence at all outside of the blackboards of mathematicians.
What’s the opinion of the science guys we have on the board?
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2019, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/2 "2019-10-03T20:02:03Z")
And the evidence for protons and neutrons isn’t found on blackboards of mathematicians? Does he have any other way of accounting for the observations that those blackboards account for? Or any argument for why the more complicated model (with protons and neutrons and pions and kaons and deltons and hyperons and so on) should be preferred over the simpler model (with just six quarks in three generations)?
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### Author:  [@Grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grey)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2019, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/3 "2019-10-03T20:08:27Z")
Your second cite is tied to some guy that has this to [say about EM wave](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329715725_The_Electromagnetic_Wave_as_an_Ordinary_Wave)
> [@](#):
>
> his just makes no physical sense that you could have an electric field rising and falling with no electric charges present and have an equally unlikely magnetic field rising and falling at a 90 degree angle to the electric field where both magically goto zero and then come back form the dead to a maximum and then repeats. There may be a lot of mainstream science that backs this up and I am not going to attempt to address all of that. Rather, I am going to ignore all of that and start fresh.
Bwahahahaa
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### Author:  [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2019, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/4 "2019-10-03T20:14:27Z")
My brief analysis of the one thing I can get without getting behind the paywall is a “paper” by Franklin Hu who lists and MIT affiliation but a Yahoo email address. It doesn’t look at all like a physic paper as there is very little math. I believe this is the same Franklin Hu who was a computer science major in the 80s(?) and seems like a bitter man from other online sources.
I hope the New Scientist article is about some other theory.
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### Author:  [@Bear\_Nenno](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bear_Nenno)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2019, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/5 "2019-10-03T20:35:02Z")
> [@OldGuy](#):
>
> It doesn’t look at all like a physic paper as there is very little math.
And not to mention that it contains gems such as this:
_If you’re so smart, you should be able to answer those simple basic physical questions. Can you? If you can’t, then you are relying on some-thing you cannot explain at all. What you believe in is, in fact, complete magic and has nothing to do with ‘science’ which ex-plains how things happen and just doesn’t blindly believe that things like conversion of matter to energy simply happen on faith alone_
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### Author:  [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2019, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/6 "2019-10-11T10:52:46Z")
[Here’s a good section of a textbook which explains the basics of what quarks are and the evidence we have of their existence](https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/College_Physics/Book%3A_College_Physics_(OpenStax)/33%3A_Particle_Physics/33.5%3A_Quarks_-_Is_That_All_There_Is%3F); in short, we slammed particles into each other real fast and looked at what flew away from the wreckage. So in order to upend quark theory, someone would have to come up with another theory which explains the evidence for protons and neutrons having three scattering centers (three places where high-energy electrons seem to scatter off of when they’re rammed into protons and neutrons) at least as well as quark theory now does, _plus_ explaining some other observations even better than quark theory can. Science changes its theories, but it can’t change the results of experiments that have already been run.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2019, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/7 "2019-10-11T14:30:16Z")
I’m a subscriber. Here are the important paragraphs.
> [@](#):
>
> As far back as the 1970s, physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft was searching for a way to make QCD more tractable. He made a bold compromise on accuracy, essentially discarding the parts of the QCD equations that described colour. This made for a tremendous simplification, says Van de Water, allowing you to do calculations on the back of an envelope.
>
> Setting the colour term aside freed quarks from needing to have three colours. Instead, they could have any number of colours you liked – even an infinite number. And because a collection of quarks can attain stability only if all colours are equally represented, an infinite number of colours means baryons with infinite numbers of quarks.
>
> This had consequences. The resolution to this has come from an unlikely place: string theory, a framework to unify the relativistic physics of the very large with the quantum physics of the very small. In the early 2000s, string theorists started noticing that their equations allowed quarks to do something bizarre. Under certain circumstances, they could take on a fraction of their usual spin. This was something that had never been seen in experiments, or predicted by QCD.
>
> Now, the quark story might be about to change far more substantially. Last year, Zohar Komargodski at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel saw a possible way to bring all of the disparate quark ideas together: using the infinite colour model of ‘t Hooft, but giving the quarks freedom to take on fractional spins. Physicists admit that his work shows ingenuity and skill – but it is also extremely complex. “I would like to understand it a little better myself,” says Georgi.
>
> Komargodski himself still thinks quarks are real, fundamental objects. He likens the situation to the odd behaviour of electrons: although there are some situations in which they take on weird properties, that doesn’t mean we need to bin the concept of electrons entirely. “But everybody has their own opinion,” he says.
>
> Rho sees it differently. “The fundamental nature of the quark essentially loses its meaning in a highly correlated system like dense matter,” he says.
This doesn’t read like woo. It only tries to apply new math to some extreme situations not previously covered. Whether it’s a meaningful change or just a difference interpretation of what we already think isn’t known yet. It doesn’t appear to have anything in common with Hu’s work, which is nonsense. This is standard QCD and string theory, high level and therefore hard to interpret.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2019, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/8 "2019-10-11T14:47:23Z")
To the extent that anything stringy can ever be called “standard”, at least.
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### Author:  [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2019, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/9 "2019-10-11T15:19:28Z")
> [@OldGuy](#):
>
> My brief analysis of the one thing I can get without getting behind the paywall is a “paper” by Franklin Hu who lists and MIT affiliation but a Yahoo email address. It doesn’t look at all like a physic paper as there is very little math. I believe this is the same Franklin Hu who was a computer science major in the 80s(?) and seems like a bitter man from other online sources.
>
> I hope the New Scientist article is about some other theory.
I suspect it is [this Franklin Hu](http://franklinhu.com/theory.html). My favorite part of the paper
> [@](#):
>
> If you send a sufficiently high energy electromagnetic wave (gamma ray) though the aether, you can break apart a neutrino and eject an electron from the matrix and it also ejects a positron. The positron is what anti-matter is.
Apropos of the OP, Hu’s Theory of Everything links to [this paper](http://franklinhu.com/quarks.html) by Hu in which he shows quarks do not exist based on the “fact” that
> [@](#):
>
> you can more easily construct a proton and a neutron out of particles that we already know exist and can directly observe, namely the positron and the electron. A neutron would
> be a simple combination of positron and electron. The obvious objection to this idea is that the positron and electron would instantly annihilate each other leaving nothing but energy. The positron we think we know is anti-matter and should not leave behind a neutron when it reacts with an electron. However, I think that there may be a non-antimatter postitron (lets call it a protron) which is identical in every way to an electron except for charge. Telling the difference betwen a postron and a positron would be exceedingly difficult since they would have all of the same characteristics.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2019, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/10 "2019-10-11T17:38:02Z")
Yes, the OP blew it by linking to that paper. It’s distracted everyone in the thread. The New Scientist article is about real physics. Ignore Hu and his idiocies.
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### Author:  [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)
#### Post date: [October 15, 2019, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wait-a-minute-quarks-dont-exist/841219/11 "2019-10-15T18:16:44Z")
Sure they do!
> **[Quark (TV series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(TV_series))**
>
> Quark is a 1977 American science fiction sitcom starring Richard Benjamin. Broadcast on Friday nights at 8:00–8:30 p.m. on NBC, the pilot aired on May 7, 1977, and the series followed as a mid-season replacement in February 1978. The series was cancelled in April 1978. Quark was created by Buck Henry, co-creator of the spy spoof Get Smart.
> The show was set on a United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol Cruiser, an interstellar garbage scow operating out of United Galaxy Space Station Perma One in the year...
> **[Quark](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Quark)**
>
> Quark was a 24th century Ferengi and the eponymous proprietor of Quark's Bar, Grill, Gaming House and Holosuite Arcade on space station Deep Space 9 (previously known as Terok Nor). He was a constant thorn in the side, sometime adversary, sometime...