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Asked by Josie to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 10 Mar 2015.
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Vicky Bayliss answered on 10 Mar 2015:
Good question… but I’m afraid I don’t know the answer. I mean, all particles are a bit strange so why they picked that one in particular I don’t know.
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Oliver Brown answered on 11 Mar 2015:
Yeah I think this property, and it’s counterpart ‘Charm’, got their names because people just liked giving things funny names in the 60s and 70s. There was a group in San Francisco in the 70s who called themselves the Fundamental Fysiks Group too…
As to what ‘Strangeness’ is, it’s actually just another property of quarks we like to keep track of — like spin, or charge. According to Wikipedia it’s to do with particle decay under particular forces, but I’m afraid it’s not my area of expertise!
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Michele Faucci Giannelli answered on 11 Mar 2015:
Strangeness is a particle property just like charge, spin and mass. In particular a particle is defined strange if one of its constituents is a strange quark.
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Jaclyn Bell answered on 13 Mar 2015:
When scientists were studying cosmic ray interactions in the 1940’s they came across a particle, named the lambda particle, which lived for much longer than expected (10^-10 seconds instead of the expected 10^-23 seconds). No-one knew why it lived for so long so they called this property “strangeness” and the name stuck! The particle was found to be made up of three quarks: an up, a down and an extra one – which got its name from the strangeness property – the strange quark.
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