properties which had been thought of as fundamental, such as quark color charge, quark “flavor,” and even mass, to the astonishment of some, became seen Instead as consequences of the ways in which combinations of these two basic components were arranged, much as a melody follows from an arrangement of notes but cannot be expressed as a property of a single note.
Thus there were two components, each of winch had an “anticomponent.” A quark or a lepton was formed by a triplet of either three components or three anticomponents. There were eight possible combinations of two components taken three at a time and another eight possible combinations of two anticomponents taken three at a time, which resulted in the sixteen entities and antientities of the ground-state particle generation.
With two types of component or anticomponent to choose from for each triplet, a triplet could comprise either three of a kind of one type, or two of one kind plus one of the other. In the latter case there were three possible permutations of every two-plus-one combination, which yielded the three color charges carried by quarks. The three-of-a-kind combinations could be arranged in only one way and corresponded to leptons, which was why leptons could not carry a color charge and did not react to the strong nuclear force.
Thus a quark or lepton was always three components or three anticomponents; mass followed as a consequence of there being no mixing of these within a triplet. Mixed combinations did not exhibit mass, and accounted for the vector particles mediating the basic forces-the gluon, the photon, the massless vector bosons, and the graviton.
Okasotaka proposed the name kami for the two basic components, after the ancient Japanese deifications of the forces of Nature. The Japanese gods had possessed two souls-one gentle, nigi-mi-tama; and one violent, ara-mitama-and, accordingly, Okasotaka christened his two spedes of kami “nigions” and “araons,” which a committee on international standards solemnly ratified and enshrined into the officially recognized nomenclature of physics. Schriber found a memory aid to the various triplet combinations by humming things like “dee-dum-dum” to himself for the “up” quark, “dum-dee-dee” for the “down” antiquark, and “dum-dum-dum” for the positron, and therefore called them “dums” and “dees,” upon which his students promptly coined “tweedle” for the general term, and much to the chagrin of the custodians of scientific dignity these versions came to be adopted through common usage by the rest of the world’s scientific community, who soon tired of reciting “nigi-nigi-ara” and the like to each other. The scientists were less receptive to Schriber’s claim that Quandum Mechanics had at last been unified with Relatividee.
Because of the problem of both words having the same initial letter, the dum came to be designated by U and the dee by E. The dum carried a one-third charge, and the dee carried none. Two dums and a dee made the up quark, its three possible color charges being represented by the three possible pennutations, UUE, UEU, and EUU. Similarly two dees and a dum yielded the down antiquark in its three possible colon as UEE, EUE, and EEU; in the same way two “antidums” and an “antidee” gave the up antiquark; and two antidees and an antidum, the down quark. Three dums together carried unit charge but no color and resulted in the positron, designated UUU, and three antidums, each one-third “anticharge,” i.e., negative, made up the normal electron, UUU. Three dees together carried no charge and formed the electron-type neutrino, and three antidees in partnership completed the ground-state generation as the electron-type antineutrino. It followed that “antitweedles” didn’t necessarily give an antiparticle, and tweedles didn’t always make a particle. Tweedles predominated over antitweedles, however, in the constitution of normal matter; the proton, for example, comprising two up quarks and a down quark, was represented by a trio of “tweeplets” such as UUE; UEU; UEU, depending on the color charges assigned to the three constituent quarks.
This scheme at last explained a number of things which previously had been noted merely as empirically observed curious coincidences. It explained why quarks came in three colors: Each one-plus-two combination of dums and dees
had three and only three possible permutations. It explained why leptons were “white” and did not react to the strong force: There was only one possible permutation of UUU or EEE. And it explained why the electrical charges on quarks and leptons were equal: They were carried by the same tweedles. Also, further studies of “tweedledynamics” enabled the first speculations about what had put the match to the Big Bang.