Q
Quark
THE HUNTING OF THE QUARK
In the Seventies
The physicists’
Very most sacred cow
Was hunting the constituents
Of a tribe they called MU TAU (up)
They knew it was composed of QUARK
But had no method right
To label and identify
A creature that must multiply
To be as large as light
Red, Blue, or Yellow
He’s a very tiny fellow!
Since Light itself outweighs the QUARK
And scatters them on sight
They must be hunted in the dark
Of sub-atomic night
Red, Yellow, Green
They’re the tiniest ever seen!
Now when one tracks Neutrinos
They are quite straight-forward guys
They plow right through the planets
As though they were clear skies
But Quark are fairy creatures
That will always dance and spin
According to the color
Of the mood that they are in.
So we named their spoor for rainbows
And that’s how we hunted them
Yellow, Blue, or Red
We’ll track them till they’re dead!
One spiraled ever upward
And one danced always down
So Upwardness and Downness were
The first Quark to be found
But then they found another
That was too strange to describe
Of course they called it Strangeness
( . . . and the scientist of his tribe?)
They postulated others
That surely must exist;
The one that lead a charmed life
Outlasting all the rest;
The artist and the poet Quark
Truth and Beauty for a start;
And they assigned to CHARM (when found)
The emblem of a heart
Yellow, Red, Blue
It seemed the thing to do.
Although these mighty hunters
In the sub-atomic dark
Still sought in vain for BEAUTY
(The Venus of the Quark)
Great was their rejoicing
When some scientific sleuth
Proved the brief existence
Of the Quark whose name was TRUTH
Red, Yellow, Blue, Green
That’s all the Quark we’ve never seen!
EPILOG:
Now and
and
and
Have all been found.
The members of the
Each bear a mark,
And though we may wonder
What else roams in the dark,
We hail the mighty hunters
Those bold, poetic hunters
Of that sub-atomic spark
And sing the stirring sage
The scientific saga
The subatomic saga
Of the hunting of the Quark!
Li.
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