The Flavors of the Quark

[bnewman]

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "The Colors of the Wind" from Disney's Pocahontas by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz

/ C Am / C Em / Am F / DmG Am(C) /

 

You think you see the stuff the world is made of

And understand how particles behave

But I know every particle of matter

Is a dance, is a process, is a wave

 

You think that you can peek behind the curtain

And find out every fact that you don't know

But even the electron isn't certain

Where it is, or else which way it wants to go

 

/ Am EmF / Am Em / F EmAm / DmG C /

 

Have you ever seen the photons going through two slits

Interfering into bands of light and dark?

Can you paint with all the colors of the gluon?

Have you tasted all the flavors of the quark?

 

Come break the hidden structure of the proton

Come measure all the fragments that fly free

Come tabulate their mass and charge and half-life

And at last begin to guess what they might be

 

For energy and matter are related

And particle and wave can interchange

And through the shock and chaos of collision

We see glimpses of a beauty new and strage

 

Can one particle decide which way another spins

Even though they're more than lightspeed far apart?

Can we paint with all the colors of the gluon?

Will we taste the many flavors of the quark?

 

/ EmAm EmAm / DmG FG /

 

If God's not the gambling kind

How would photons act when they're intertwined?

 

And however would the muon know how long to wait

Before it dies as a neutrino and a spark?

We need to paint with all the colors of the gluon

We need to taste the many flavors of the quark

 

/ DmG EmF / Am G C - /

 

We can speculate and guess but we'll never know unless

We have tasted all the flavors of the quark!