You have arrived at a web site committed to helping you better understand our universe!  We believe that gaining a better understanding is one of the most useful, enjoyable and exciting human endeavors.

clues about us from our name

Quarks are one of the handful of fundamental particles that serves as the construction material of ourselves and our world.  Quarks are components of protons and neutrons at the core of atoms, which in turn bond to make our molecules.  By understanding the parts of our world and how they interact and behave, we gain insight into ourselves and how we can better live our lives in harmony with our environment.

Nets are a loose mesh collected together to serve a broader purpose.  Here it refers to the World Wide Web network of humans designed for our mutual benefit.

A virtual image is like what we see in an common mirror.  It is constructed when our brains surmise that the light rays we observed came to us in strait-line paths from some source behind the mirror.  But while such images often are very useful, the light is actually reflected from elsewhere, generally providing us with a view we might not otherwise have.  Here we refer to experiences provided via the Internet Web, not of the actual world, but valuable images of it.

Our QuarkNet icon (above in the title) represents the beam pipe of an accelerator, such as at FermiLab in the United States or the new, Large Hadronic Collider at CERN in Europe.  In such colliders particles are smashed together revealing in the collision products the properties of such particles as the quarks.  Many of our links lead to pages with much more information about such colliders and what we are learning from them.  Other links lead to other frontiers of our understanding.

We invite you to join us using the high technology images of the Internet to gain experiences, learning about our world, which might otherwise be difficult or impossible.

page created 18 July 2007
latest revision 24 May 2010
conceived, designed & maintained to support virtual QuarkNet

by D Trapp

This project has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Office of High Energy Physics, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy.  However the choice of content, opinions expressed and any omissions or other errors are those of D. Trapp and not the responsibility of NSF, DoE, FermiLab or QuarkNet.