22 May 2011

The quark spaghetti model

Spaghetti explain the quark model, claims Schiller. It is a strong claim; not even Bilson-Thompson makes this claim with his band model. Lets look at this in more detail.

The quark model is a way to describe all hadrons with a small number of constituents: with 6 quarks and 6 antiquarks. The spaghetti model proposes a tangle for each quark and then claims that these tangles reproduce all hadrons. Schiller indeed provides the tangles for most hadrons: he draws the tangles for the best-known mesons and baryons. He claims that the tangles explain quark confinement, asymptotic freedom, CP violation, and the mass sequence of all hadrons. Wait! Several Nobel prizes were awarded for these results. And we can understand them with a few drawings? If it is true, Gell-Mann and his entourage will turn yellow. If it is wrong, we can make fun of Schiller.

How can we check such a claim? We take the review of particle physics by the particle data group and check all of it against the strand model. I'll start tomorrow.

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