odditudes-and-weirdities

Holidays today are about taking risks/chances, the Spanish language, and laboratories: National Picnic Day Quark Day Saint George's Day  AKA  Lover's Day Spanish Language Day Take a Chance Day World Laboratories Day On this date in 1616  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra   died, which is why Spanish Language Day is celebrated on this date. Saint George, who died on this date in 303 AD, has his day celebrated similar to St Valentine's Day in parts of Spain, which gave rise to Lover's Day. In 1994 the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced the discovery of the top quark, inspiring Quark Day. It's also a day to celebrate our laboratories. Sieuwert Otterloo on Unsplash

It's Quark Day, the anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of the top quark in 1994. This was the last of the quarks to be discovered; it joined up quark, down quark, charm quark, strange quark, and bottom quark. This discovery was pretty important to physicists. The Standard Model of particle physics - which explains the electro-magnetic force, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force (sorry gravity) - predicted the existence of the 6 quarks, so the discovery helps to support the correctness of this model. Ranjithsiji, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons