ARE WE REALLY MADE OF QUARKS?

Are we really made of quarks? The answer to this question is “yes”, but physicists have not arrived at it easily. The quarks model, which embodied a radically new conceptual view of the structure of matter, was hotly disputed by the physics community, and in general it was rejected. It took ten years for it to be finally accepted, after convincing and inescapable experimental trials.

The discovery of quarks has changed our view of the basic structure of matter and it has changed the course of particle physics. In this talk the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Jerome Friedman, will tell us about the particles that make up the protons and neutrons inside the atoms of all matter: quarks.