Quarks : The Stuff of Matter [Hardcover]

Harald Fritzsch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 22, 1983

Provides an account for the general reader of what physicists have learned about the atomic nucleus, protons, neutrinos, and quarks - the basic constituents of all matter.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 297 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books, Inc. (July 22, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465067816
• ISBN-13: 978-0465067817
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,256,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars this is the original 1982 edition - get the later 1989 edition, May 21, 2010

By 

Howard Newcombe - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Quarks: The Stuff of Matter (Hardcover)

This book is one of the few examples I know of that is authored by a pioneering theorist in a new field -- quark physics and QCD. Harald Fritzsch, together with Murray Gell-Mann, created the first theories of nucleon structure and QCD. In this book he explains how they deduced the inner workings of the hadrons (including the proton and neutron) based on previous experience with QED (quantum electrodynamics) and symmetry principles.
In the 1950's the new generation of high-energy accelerators started spewing out vast numbers of never-before-seen particles. They resembled the familiar proton and neutron in that they participated in the strong interaction, but they had other strange properties -- most notably, extremely long lifetimes. Certain varieties appeared only in particular combinations, what was called associated production -- much like chemical compounds. Theorists the world over struggled to understand the new physics. Several theories were created: bootstrap and S-matrix are remembered most nowadays. But one of the new theories succeeded all these, the quark theory.
Gell-Mann and Zweig postulated a new level of matter beneath the nucleon, elementary strongly-interacting component particles on par with the electron. Extrapolating from the knowledge base acquired from the recently-formulated QED, in combination with all the other quantum-mechanical paraphenalia (exclusion principle, uncertainty principle, virtual particle pairs, vacuum polarization#, a new theory of matter was deduced to explain the volumes of new data generated by the experimentalists.
Then in the 1960s came the momentous results from the SLAC electron accelerator -- deep inelastic scattering. Lo and behold, there indeed did seem to be tiny, hard objects swirling around inside the proton and the neutron. The theorists had seen in the 1950s what the experimentalists could not.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this story as told by Fritzsch is the origin of the notion of quark color. At first, they conceived it only as a necessity in order to avoid violation of the Pauli exclusion principle. There is a certain hadron which requires that all three quarks have the same spin #I think the omega ?). This is disallowed, so they invented a new property, "color", simply to avoid this uncomfortable situation. Later, however, the color concept came into its own as an explanation for the binding force between quarks (origin of the familiar strong force), and further went on to explain the absence of free quarks -- quark confinement. This is a stunning example of a purely theoretical construction accounting neatly for entirely unanticipated phemonena.
This book tells the story from the viewpoint of a pioneering quark theorist. This type of discovery is quite unlikely to ever again occur in physics. All experien