At FermiLab, two teams of nearly 1,000 scientists (USA, Italy, Japan, Canada, and Taiwan) announced the discovery of the Top Quark: it has a mass of 175 GeV (it weighs as much as a gold atom!) One of the last pieces of the Standard Model falls into place. Standard Model: 6 quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top or truth, bottom or beauty), 6 leptons (electron neutrino, electron, muon neutrino, muon, tau neutrino, and tau), and gauge bosons for the four forces: a photon for the electromagnetic force, W-, W+, and Z0 for the weak force, 8 gluons for the strong force, and the (undiscovered) graviton for gravity. The discovery of the Top Quark, like that of other fundamental particles, such as the Higgs Boson, is not in reality a “Eureka event” that happens suddenly, but a patient collection of data that lasts months or years, in order to reach the necessary statistical evidence (5-sigma).
