Physicists are bored

This is the conclusion I came to yesterday with the help of one of them.

It all started from the fact that this physicist (my father) did his PhD on the topic of Gluons, and for those who have no idea what Gluons are, they are in layman’s terms, subatomic particles. So, curious about Gluons and not being as bright as a Physicist, I looked them up on Wikipedia. I fell on a lot of mathematical equations that I somewhat understood partially, and at the bottom of the page links to other subatomic particles.

Believe it or not there is a hypothetical subatomic particle called a Glueball

So intrigued by the Glueball, I mentioned it to my father and my wife. My wife then tells me that it sounds somewhat like slang for a sexual favor.

Upon this realization I started to think about Quarks, other subatomic particles. Quarks are defined by flavors. These flavors being: Up, Down, Strange, Charmed, Top and Bottom (the last two are sometimes referred to as Truth and Beauty)

While I have looked up the explanation for these definitions today :

“The quark flavors were given their names for a number of reasons. The up and down quarks are named after the up and down components of isospin, which they carry.[43] Strange quarks were given their name because they were discovered to be components of the strange particles discovered in cosmic rays years before the quark model was proposed; these particles were deemed "strange" because they had unusually long lifetimes.[44] Glashow, who coproposed charm quark with Bjorken, is quoted as saying, "We called our construct the 'charmed quark', for we were fascinated and pleased by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world."[45] The names "top" and "bottom" were chosen because they are "logical partners for up and down quarks".[44] In the past, top and bottom quarks were sometimes referred to as "truth" and "beauty" respectively, but these names have mostly fallen out of use.[46]”

It still makes me chuckle to think of a conversation going something like this :

Man : Hey baby you down for a Gluon
Woman : No way! I don’t do that sort of stuff, I only do Bottom Quarks
Man : You’re gonna give me Glueballs.

Well, I’m sure you can imagine all the other conversations of this type. It makes for an interesting day.

Well having hypothetised these conversations, I can only imagine what physicists do ain their spare time.

If you had the patience to read all this, thank you.