Can someone explain this in laymens terms? I don’t know what Pentaquarks or tetraquarks or whatever else this stuff mean. And what does this change about what we know about physics or sub atomic particles etc?
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This might be a bad analogy, but maybe you can think of the work that theoretical physicists do at places like CERN kinda like someone who knows nothing of construction trying to figure out how a house is built.
You know there are walls and floors and windows and doors, but you don’t understand how they all fit together to make this structure. So you take it apart and examine each piece, writing out how it works with and supports the pieces around it to make this whole thing.
To understand how our universe is built, physicists have to take apart the pieces that build it. Long ago, the learned people of the world thought that everything was comprised of four elements – Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. As their knowledge and understanding of physical laws increased, they saw this was not so. So the theory of +atoms was developed.
Then we realized that atoms were not the smallest thing there was. They were themselves made of smaller particles – electrons, protons and neutrons. THEN scientists found that even THESE had still smaller components that made those parts.
But we can’t actually see the parts, we can only deduce their existence and their properties by blowing them up and observing their interactions. Kinda like blowing up a house and figuring out how it’s built by how the pieces fly apart.
I don’t need to know the names and properties of every particle they find, I’m just waiting for the end result, myself.
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