WHAT’S THE STORY?

SCIENTISTS at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland have discovered something unusual about one of the basic building blocks of all life, the so-called “charm quark”. They used the Large Hadron Collider to smash atomic particles and found differences in the rate of decay of particles and antiparticles with the charm quark. The findings could explain how everything came to exist.

SAY THAT AGAIN?

LET Live Science explain: “Every particle of matter has an antiparticle, which is identical in mass but with an opposite electrical charge. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate one another. The Big Bang should have created an equivalent amount of matter and antimatter, and all of those particles should have destroyed each other rapidly, leaving nothing behind but pure energy. Clearly, that didn’t happen. Instead, about one in a billion quarks (the elementary particles that make up protons and neutrons) survived. Thus, the universe exists.”

Hope that’s all clear...

WHAT’S A QUARK AND WHERE DID IT GET ITS NAME?

QUARKS were given their name by the man whose theories first suggested their existence. He is the great American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his work in explaining how such elementary particles worked.

He called them quarks, and they are believed to be the only items in science named after a line in a James Joyce novel.

A lover of word play, Gell-Mann knew the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and loved the line “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

Gell-Mann explained: “You can’t see them directly. They have some unusual properties, and that’s why it was difficult for people to believe in them at the beginning. And lots of people didn’t. Lots of people thought I was crazy. Quarks are permanently trapped inside other particles like neutrons and protons. You can’t bring them out individually to study them. They’re a little peculiar in that respect.”

WHY IS IT CHARMING AND WHAT DOES THE NEW DISCOVERY MEAN?

The charm quark – the name doesn’t actually mean anything – is one of six quarks that, along with leptons, form the basic building blocks of ordinary matter. It is hundreds of times more massive than the “up” and “down” quarks that make up protons and neutrons. The others are known as “strange”, “top” and “bottom”. The new discovery concerning charm quarks was made by a team involving Sheldon Stone, a professor of physics at Syracuse University in New York. He is convinced they’ve reached a “historic milestone” in understanding how matter is able to exist.

Physicists rely on something called the Standard Model to explain everything at the subatomic scale. Stone told Live Science he wondered if the predictions made by the Standard Model can explain the charm quark measurement his team just made, or if it will require some sort of new physics.

HOW CLOSE ARE WE REALLY TO UNDERSTANDING THE BASIS OF LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING?

WE’RE much closer than we were, but still a long way from total comprehension of the basis of the universe’s existence. Even if we did achieve the impossible, plenty of people would doubt it, unless perhaps the ghost of Stephen Hawking arrived to tell them.