KH+Week+of+Jan+7


 * __Jan 7, 2008__**

Took a look at the first part of [|The Particle Adventure], [|What is Fundamental?] In this part they talk how fundamental means the smallest building block, and isn't made of anything smaller. For awhile the world thought that the atom was the fundamental particle of everything, then the nucleus, then protons, neutrons, and electrons, but all were wrong. Finally they found the quark, which with the electron and other particles, seems to be the fundamental particles. Physicists have created what they call the Standard Model which is made of 6 kinds of quarks, 6 kinds of leptons, and the force carriers. In the Standard Model it says that all things are made of quarks and leptons and exchange force carriers.


 * __Jan 8, 2008__**

Look at another part of [|The Particle Adventure] today. I looked at the section [|What is the World made Of?] For every type of matter, there is also an antimatter, or antiparticle. When an particle and antiparticle meet they annihilate into pure energy. They still don't know why there is so much more matter than antimatter. There are 6 quarks classified in 3 pairs or flavors, up/down, charm/strange, and top/bottom. Composite particles made of quarks are called hadrons. Baryons are particles made of 3 quarks and mesons are made of one quark and one antiquark. The last matter particle are the leptons. Leptons have six particles, three charged and three are not. The three charged particles are the electron, muon, and the tau while the non charged particles are the three types of neutrinos, electron neutrino, tau neutrino, and the muon neutrino. When a heavy lepton decays, one of the particles it decays into is always its corresponding neutrino.

__**Jan 9, 2008**__ Today I took a look at the third part of [|The Particle Adventure], [|What holds it together?] There are four fundamental interactions or forces in this world, gravity, electromagnetic, strong force, and the weak force. These interactions happen by exchanging force carriers between matter. Electromagnetism causes same charged things to repel and oppositely-charged things to attract. The strong force, is the force that holds the nucleus of atoms together, despite the protons wanting to propel each other due to electromagnetism. The force carrier of the strong force is gluons, which are tightly "glued" quarks, making hadrons. The weak force is responsible for the decay of massive quarks and leptons into lighter quarks and leptons. The particle that carries gravity is known as the gravitron. Suprisingly the Standard Model can't satisfactory explain gravity, and the gravitron has never been observed in an expirement. The Pauli Exclusion Principle states that at one time no two particles in the same quantum state could exist in the same place at the same time. However there are two particles that ignore this principle, fermions and bosons. A fermion is any particle that has an odd half-integer (like 1/2, 3/2...) spin. Bosons are those particles which have an integer spin (0, 1, 2...).