On this day in physics: 27 January 1936, Happy Birthday to Samuel C. C. Ting, a Nobel Prize winning physicist for discovering the J/ψ (J/Psi) meson or psion. He turns 80 today. Happy Birthday! He is currently the lead researcher on the 1.5 billion dollar alpha magnetic spectrometer research experiment aboard the ISS (Word of the day!) It is working to detect specific cosmic rays in search of Dark Matter [Source].
Word of the Day: Meson- a particle composed of one quark and one antiquark. These can be comprised of their own "species", i.e. a Charm and Anticharm, aka "Charmonium", or different "species" such as in a Pion, which consists of an up and anti-down quark. Mesons which consist of the same type of quark and antiquark, such as Charmonium, are referred to as Quarkonium. Now, one thing that I thought about when I was researching about this, most particle/antiparticle pairs annihilate, releasing energy. How is it that these particles exist? Well, the short answer is that the lifetimes of something even like a pion, which is made of an up/antidown pair, lives for something on the order of 1e-8 seconds, or 10 nanoseconds. Protons and Neutrons are not mesons, since they are not made of 2 quarks, but rather 3 quarks, none of which are quark/antiquark pairs.
Killer Resource: Jupiter is sometimes referred to as a failed star.
Keywords: Quark, Meson, Antiquark, Pair, Up, Antidown, Quarkonium, Charm, Charmonium, Jupiter.
