Path: csiph.com!xmission!news.alt.net!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!nntp.TheWorld.com!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: moroney@world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) Newsgroups: sci.physics Subject: Re: Questions about quarks Date: Tue, 22 May 2018 16:13:22 +0000 (UTC) Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 Lines: 33 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: shell01.theworld.com X-Trace: pcls7.std.com 1527005602 15754 192.74.137.71 (22 May 2018 16:13:22 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@TheWorld.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 22 May 2018 16:13:22 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: nn/6.6.5 Xref: csiph.com sci.physics:686640 john writes: >Odd >As long as you end up with a "colorless" combination, it's fine. Here >"color" refers to QCD charge. There is for example a baryon with three up >quarks, and another with three down quarks. There is also a meson with an >up and an anti-up. There are no particles with just one quark or, say, two >up quarks, because that can't be made colorless. >Nice. >But electrons are not in motion because then the moving charge would >radiate- right? It's actually acceleration that they cannot do, but it appears that perhaps you now have a clue. Will you keep it? This doesn't really have anything to do with the question being asked, however. To the OP: The following is a vast oversimplification but it describes the general idea of what is going on. Imagine you're trying to pull a quark off of a proton (3 quarks). It takes a lot of energy to work against the strong force. Finally there is so much energy in the "stretched" bond that, using E=mc^2, the energy becomes a quark-antiquark pair, which separate. The antiquark attaches to the quark you are trying to pull off while the quark attaches to the other two of the former proton. So you wind up with a meson (quark-antiquark pair) instead of the quark you are trying to pull off, and the new quark and the other two form a baryon (perhaps a proton again or neutron, or other baryon). The increased mass of the final system comes from the energy you added trying to pull the quark off. As long as various conserved quantities are conserved (charge and so forth), this can happen.