Strange Charm

A quark is a fundamental constituent of matter

Observed in 1968 through deep electric scatter

We found that protons were more complex than we thought

We thought they were solid particles but they are not

Protons in fact are made up of three separate pieces

It just gets more confusing as our knowledge increases

And that is what a quark is; it’s a piece of a proton

And they also make up other things including the neutron

Up down strange charm top bottom

If you don’t know what a quark is it doesn’t matter, you still got em

And with leptons and bosons unless something’s amiss

They make up everything that we can see and that we know exists

Things made up of quarks including protons and neutrons

Are composite particles that physicist call hadrons

Many times those hadrons are theoretically described

But most exist for only very brief amounts of time

Quarks have electric charge, colour charge, mass and spin

And having colour charge means they exist solely in side

Other kinds of particles that cannot exist alone

Which is why quarks have never been studied on their own

Up down strange charm top bottom

If you don’t know what a quark is it doesn’t matter, you still got em

And with leptons and bosons unless something’s amiss

They make up everything that we can see and that we know exists

These tiny bits of matter are part of almost everything

There is no unified theory to make it less confusing

But the fact that we’ve identified that they exist at all

Is so remarkable that I am constantly in awe

Up down strange charm top bottom

If you don’t know what a quark is it doesn’t matter, you still got em

And with leptons and bosons unless something’s amiss

They make up everything that we can see and that we know exists