JUST LOVE THOSE HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICS COMICS
No human in the entire history of this planet has ever observed a “quark”. The so-called evidence for “quarks” is based entirely on secondary or tertiary normal decay products and it is INFERRED that they decayed from “quarks”.
Likewise the scattering experiments that are interpreted as scattering by unobservable “quarks” have other interpretations, but theoretical physicists desperately wanted “quarks” so they ignored other models.
After Gellman-Mann introduced the “quark” model as a fictional accounting device for particle family numerology, physicists looked everywhere from the deep ocean, to the Moon, to outer space and everywhere in between for free “quarks” with fractional charges. They found not a single one. That was a big problem. So they INVENTED confinement, which is a completely ad hoc way of hiding “quarks” inside hadrons where we can never observe them.
Regarding the “quark-gluon” plasma “evidence”, they predicted that it would behave like a weakly interacting gas. The RHIC observational evidence says this prediction was WRONG. The plasma, much to the
surprise of theoretical physicists behaved like a strongly interacting fluid, which is much more like what Discrete Scale Relativity anticipates. Of course, given time the theoretical physicists “adjusted” their model to fit
the new data, and now they see it as more confirmation of the “quark” fiction. Another epicycle in their Ptolemaic models.
That’s particle physics for you: they do not study nature; they tell nature how it should be according to their Platonic fictions. Quarks are ad hoc, fractional charges are ad hoc, “confinement” is ad hoc and “asymptotic freedom” is ad hoc.
A more natural way to understand subatomic particles is in terms of Kerr-Newman ultracompact objects which are solutions of the Einstein-Maxwell equations. Black holes in common parlance.
See: http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1078 .
As Leonard Susskind said: “One of the deepest lessons that we have learned over the past decade is that there is no fundamental difference between elementary particles and black holes”