The particle does not have a name in the official (PDG) listing, only a symbol "b". The "bottom" quantum number is universally called as such so one talks of "bottom hadrons" and so on. On the other hand the general area of research is called "b-physics" or "beauty physics", LHCb is the LHC-beauty experiment and so on. It makes perfect sense that this article uses "beauty" throughout for consistency.
At the end of the day its just a name and this particle happens to have more than one (as does the J/psi and others) and neither is more whimsical than the other. Physicists tend to be quite whimsical anyway, particle physicists perhaps especially so.
...of which the story itself is an overly neat simplification that has spread by better capturing the imagination of descriptive-minded physics students, in the teachers' own science communicating :)
There is a huge demand for CS skills of all kinds. CERN has one of the largest SCADA installations in the world, runs its own internet exchange point, operates a network of computing centers with a million cpu and hundreds of PB of data, and maintains many many millions of lines of code of specialized software, just to give you an idea.
It is a fantastic place to work, the level of expertise and dedication among the people there (scientists and engineers alike) is very very high.
I realize this isn't a big deal for quarks, but it's been on my mind a lot. The application to politics is left as an exercise for the reader.
https://home.cern/science/experiments/lhcb
Moreover, the paper that describes the result that this article is discussing has "beauty quark" in the name: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11769
Right there with developers but our terrible naming conventions don't really make it to publications.
On the other hand, everyone else who discovers a hominin still gives it a new species name.
The various quantum numbers of the quarks are real physical quantities, but not ones for which we have a good way of conceptualizing in classical, macroscopic life. The up and down quarks aren't actually spinning, but they do kind of behave as if they were spinning, so their names make sense, but for the others there isn't even an analogue. Luckily no one expects to be able to visualize strangeness, and likewise charm and beauty convey quite well that the naming is arbitrary. Top and bottom on the other hand sound like they could refer to a "real" property, or perhaps represent two ends of a spectrum. While I've seen no evidence that confusion is rampant, it would be easy to see how confusion could arise. If anything, the Top quark should be renamed to something more whimsical, or both should be renamed to something more clearly arbitrary like heads and tails.
The fact that "up" is associated with positivity is totally arbitrary, and even the fact that positive charges are called positive is totally arbitrary.
Does top quark have its antecedent too?
Also, Some physicists call the fourth, fifth, and sixth derivative of position, "snap, crackle, and pop" respectively. Physicists are a fun lot aren't they?
Not defending BBC's using non-prescribed terms, but quarks were always named whimsically. The word quark itself having been taken from Ulysses.
It's hard to argue with snap following jerk, then acceleration then velocity. The next two follow snap, if not physically then at least historically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...
I thought were all useless terms but apparently snap is quite commonly used in quadrotor motion control.
I've also heard this is important for self-driving convoys. You want the cars in the convoy to all accelerate and brake smoothly rather than jostle all the things inside them.
That's third derivative of position and called jerk.
Atomic cross section is measured in barns. As in "you couldn't hit a barn door".
I’ve seen “sideways” sub for strange, which actually seems to fit the mnemonic better anyway. Why not “curly” or something instead of charm?
In particular, collider experiments were giving rise to a 'particle zoo' of pions, kaons, lambdas, etc. all of which were assumed to be fundamental. Some of these lasted much longer than expected, and were called "strange".
It turned out that these could be modelled by giving fundamental particles a new property, which got the name "strangeness". Similar to how particles can have "charge", which is zero for neutral particles; non-strange particles have zero strangeness. Their long lifetime was explained due to the strong force conserving strangeness: collisions between non-strange particles can make pairs of particles with positive/negative strangeness (as long as it sums to zero); but once those individual particles have separated they can no longer decay via the strong force; they have to wait for the weak force, which gives them a longer half-life.
It was only later, once the quark model became more accepted, that these particles were no longer considered fundamental, and "strangeness" could be explained as "containing strange quarks".
On the other hand charm, beauty/bottom and truth/top seem to all be built on the quark model from the start; which makes the whimsy in their names more deliberate.
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FYI the BBC's Horizon did an episode in the 60s called "Strangeness Minus Three" ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01z4p1j ) which is interesting to watch in hindsight, now that we have quarks and the standard model; and makes a nice comparison to the more recent search for the Higgs boson.
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Tangentially this idea, of a new property whose conservation prevents massive particles from decaying, also arises in supersymmetric models of dark matter. There, supersymmetric particles have a different "R parity" to normal particles, which prevents them decaying even if they're very massive; such particles are a candidate for dark matter.
They still teach it for some reason though.