April 29, 2002
DOWN HOME:
'Strange quarks' explain bad days
___When Lindsay and Molly were little, one of our favorite books was "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" by Judith Viorst, illustrated by Ray Cruz.
___The girls loved it, and I loved to read it to them, because (a) we liked the pictures, (b) it was funny, (c) we all have rotten days and (d) compared to Alexander's, our day wasn't all that bad, which made us feel better at bedtime.
___I thought about Alexander the other day at breakfast, as I read the Dallas Morning News. Alexandra Witze, the News' science writer, reported on a breakthrough by a couple of Southern Methodist University scientists, Eugene Herrin and Vigdor Teplitz.
___They possibly have discovered "strange quark matter." This explains a lot. You'll see.
___Quarks are subatomic particles that make up the basic building blocks of matter.
___Normal stuff, known as "ordinary matter" to scientists, is made up of two kinds of quarks, "up quarks" and "down quarks," that form protons and neutrons in atoms. However, the SMU scientists possibly have discovered "strange quark matter," which is made up of "up" and "down" quarks as well as "strange quarks."
___Theoretically, space is chock-full of flying pieces of "strange quark matter" that is hurled everywhere when "strange quark stars" collide and smack into smithereens.
___Norman Glendenning, a "strange quark matter" expert from--where else?--California, says 1 quadrillion "strange quark nuggets" have struck "every square centimeter of Earth's surface."
___Herrin and Teplitz have seismically documented how two of these nuggets hit and passed through Earth in the fall of 1993.
___A "strange quark nugget" can be only a millimeter across but weigh a ton and "wouldn't interact with ordinary matter, so it wouldn't hurt anything in its path," Witze wrote.
___Another scientist, Angela Olinto of Chicago, predicts whoever documents "strange quark matter" will win a Nobel Prize. Well, just send it over to my house.
___Here's the deal: A "strange quark nugget" weighs a ton and is likely to strike anyplace on Earth practically any time. But since it doesn't "interact with" normal stuff, we don't exactly know it. So, have you ever been going along just fine and then you started having a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day"? You probably got hit with a "strange quark nugget." A ton of anything ought to give you a bad day.
___Don't feel singled out. It happens to everybody. But now, the next time it happens to you, I want you to write the Nobel Prize people and tell them you're documenting "Knox's Theory of 'Strange Quark' Bad-dayness."
___And although it's no guarantee against the occasional bad day, the best way to have a good day is to start it with a prayer that you'll be a good steward of the next 24 hours and spend it doing God's will.
The Baptist Standard
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