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Today we are going to look at a particularly strange form of matter, literally called strange matter, and it’s contagious. It’s so stable that all matter in the universe might want to be strange. Let’s find out more.

First let’s think about matter.

What we call normal matter, although we don’t even call it normal matter, we just call it matter, is made from atoms and as I’ve already mentioned in a number of videos, atoms are made from protons, neutrons and electrons and even the protons and neutrons are made from smaller particles called quarks. Neutrons are made from 1 up and 2 down quarks and protons are made from 2 up and 1 down quark. So all the matter that we can see and normally associate with the term matter is made up of just 2 types of quark and electrons. So what about other types of quark, well quarks are quite strange things.

Firstly, quarks come in different flavours (I know, physicists are weird), and there are 6 flavours, they are up and down, and those are the ones we are familiar with, but there are others. There are also top and bottom quarks, and finally we have strange and charm quarks. There are also corresponding antiquarks for each of the 6 flavours.

Chapters

0:00 Introduction
0:50 Quarks
1:35 Mesons & Baryons
3:45 Strange Matter
4:50 Neutron Stars
6:20 Strange Quarks
7:50 Neutron Star Collisions
8:30 Strangelets
8:45 Strange Matter Spreads
9:20 Does Strange Matter really exist?