Post #17-My Blog Background

You may ask: Why did Nate Kloepfer choose to have a blocky background for his blog? I chose a blocky background for two reasons: to remind me of my nuclide charts which consist of integer numbers of protons and neutrons plotted against each other to display the known nuclides and their decay properties, and to remind me of one of my favorite video games, MInecraft, which consists of a world of specific "blocks".
There can only be integer amounts of protons and neutrons in a nucleus. A proton cannot be divided into thousands of smaller versions of itself: it is composed of only three elementary subatomic particles which are two up quarks and one down quark bound by virtual pions carrying the strong nuclear force. Neutrons also cannot be divided into smaller versions of themselves because they are also composed of three elementary subatomic particles: two down quarks and one up quark, with virtual pions and gluons holding them all together constituting the nuclear strong force. Protons and neutrons are part of a larger family of subatomic particles called "baryons" (bary- means "heavy") that consists of many heavier, very unstable baryons. The most stable baryon after the proton and neutron is the lambda baryon, which is the third least massive of all the baryons. It is composed of one up quark, one down quark, and one strange quark. The strange quark is unstable because its decay to an less massive up quark is exothermic, and the lambda baryon therefore decays by emitting a negative weak boson that splits into an anti-up quark and a down quark with a lifetime of a seventh of a nanosecond. The most massive possible baryon is the triple bottom omega baryon, with three bottom quarks, but it has not been observed in any experiments. I predict its mass to be around 15x the mass of a proton, or about the mass of a nitrogen atom. Its predicted lifetime is relatively long compared to other baryons, about 500 femtoseconds, because its bottom quarks can only decay via a negative weak boson to charm quarks or less frequently, up quarks. Top quarks do not form hadrons (this includes baryons) because the Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts its lifetime to be 5E-25 seconds, or about a trillion times shorter than the triple bottom omega's predicted lifetime. This lifetime of 5E-25 seconds is too short for the top quark to interact via the strong force to form any hadron (composite particle composed of quarks). The top quark's very short lifetime is due to its high mass (approximately the mass of a rhenium atom or about 186x heavier than a proton) and the presence of its third-generation cousin, the bottom quark, makes it so that its weak decay is very easy, for intra-generational decays are more rapid than inter-generational decays between quarks.