I needed to free my mind from poetry and politics for a while, and the Higgs boson has been in the news, so I’m reading a book about quarks.  I understand almost none of it although I’ve read a little here and there about nuclear physics during my life.  Right now I don’t know enough to think of any questions to pursue.  I’m just absorbing names, classifications (6 leptons!), a few actions, interesting facts like the one that a proton (unless it’s the neutron) consists of three quarks and a bunch of gluons, the mass of the gluons about equaling the mass of the quarks.  Gluons hold the quarks together–and do this more strongly the greater the distance between a gluon and a quark.  So there seems no way to separate the quarks in a proton.  I guess that does give me a question: how did quarks and gluons get together in the first place?  Probably the magical Higgs boson allows it by producing a field in which, basically, anything goes.

Some of the diagrams involved look like they’d be interesting in poems. . . .

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