impossible to name them all?

Since discovering the word muon, I’ve wanted to do a post about subatomic particles; however, even despite my love of lists, it’s just too much.

To get you started (in case you really want to know more), there are:

• Fermions (which are either quarks or leptons (from the Greek for “thin”))
• Bosons
• Hadrons (which are either mesons (from the Greek for “intermediate”) or baryons (from the Greek for “heavy”))

There are more, and my head is swimming. You figure it out from there?

There is also such thing in physics (and therefore the world) as strange quarks and charm quarks, which sound, dare I say it, charmingly quirky.

[p.s. and now that you know what a “hadron” is, see what the large hadron collider will do, starting Sept. 10…]