Science in Seconds - George Zweig
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Science in Seconds
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People of Science
GEORGE ZWEIG
Brit Trogen: Science is full of tales of unsung heroes.
For Darwin, it was Alfred Wallace;
for quark theory, it was George Zweig.
In 1964, Zweig was a promising graduate student,
under Richard Feynmann, when he made the discovery
that would define the rest of his academic career:
that all subatomic particles are made of a small number
of basic parts.
Zweig suggested that there were four such parts,
which he named "aces", after the playing cards.
Unfortunately, the CERN Journal "Physics Letters"
refused Zweig's elaborate paper on the subject.
The idea that matter was made up of ineffable,
invisible particles was widely ridiculed.
But in the same year, another version of the same idea
was proposed by physicist Murray Gell-Mann,
a prominent scientist, and mentor to Zweig.
Gell-Mann managed to publish in the exact same journal,
though the editor described it as a crazy paper.
Gell-Mann named the particles "quarks",
a name taken from James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake".
Unlike Zweig, who believed aces
to be physical constituents of hadrons,
Gell-Mann's quarks were purely mathematical entities,
fractions of charges that couldn't be isolated.
Ultimately, Gell-Mann would develop
a combination of these two theories,
Zweig's constituent quarks (or "aces")
being the covering of the Gell-Mann's current quarks.
And for his efforts, was rewarded
with the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Zweig, however, was not so lucky:
his crazy idea let to him being blackballed
from the position at the major university,
the department head calling him "a charlatan".
He ultimately switched fields to neurobiology,
and today works in finance.
But his work has been absorbed into modern physics,
where we now all accept that matter is made up
of a handful of fundamental particles,
including quarks.
Licensed for educational/non-profit purposes only.
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