Is charm a flavor?

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I suppose that tags are easier to conceptualize than quarks, but there's still something to be learned from the way that quarks have been categorized. By giving them flavors which are clearly not related to taste (up, down, top, bottom, charm, strange) and then giving each of those flavors "colors", it would seem that physicists are admitting that they have no way of actually picturing what quarks might look like, or even are. The metaphor, by being so clearly detached from the physical world, reminds us that we really don't have the proper words to define just what it is we're talking about.

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Go to: But you can, you can!