down quark
- noun
- /daʊn kwɑrk/
- Specialized
:
quark down
OK, There's an up quark, a down quark, a strange quark, a charm quark.
- OK, There's an up quark, a down quark, a strange quark, a charm quark.
- There are up quarks, down quarks, truth quarks, beauty quarks, strange quarks.
- Those are the ones that we are made of electrons up and down quarks and photons and gluons to hold them together.
Surface Forms
Morphology
down + quark
Knowing 'down' and 'quark' allows a learner to infer this is a particular type or subtype of quark (i.e. a kind of subatomic particle), so the basic category is compositional. However, the technical sense of 'down' as a flavour label with specific properties (charge -1/3, mass) is arbitrary and not derivable from the everyday meaning of 'down', so detailed meaning requires domain knowledge.
Etymology
Down quark comes from two parts: the word quark, which a scientist borrowed from a line in a James Joyce book, and the simple label down, chosen to pair with up so people could tell two kinds apart. So a down quark is just the down kind of tiny 'particle' inside protons and neutrons, and that name helps remember which kind has a small negative charge.
