[lasto]

Dark matter is the name cosmologist gave to the force that would be required to align the observable facts about the universe with the current physical understanding of it. In other words, we observe an accelerating expansion of space yet our understanding of how matter works suggests that this expansion should be decelerating - in order to 'explain' this they proposed a 'new' force which, when added to the current understanding gives the observed results. This force is known as 'dark energy' and the matter connected with this energy is known as 'dark matter'. Dark, simply because we cannot as yet observe it, not because of any mysterious evil force or metaphysical implication.

Quarks are subatomic particles - bits of atoms. Or rather bits of the bits of atoms. Atom is a word which literally means 'indivisible' from the Greek tome which means 'to cut' and the negative sign a- , as in amoral. It was first used by Demokritus over 2500 years ago to describe something that maintained it's properties even in the smallest amount. Today we consider the Chemical elements to be the equivalent of Demokritus's atom. Now we use the word rather loosely to describe the smallest particle of any chemical element that retains its identity amongst its constituent parts and arrangement thereof. The three basic constituent parts were described by Sir Arthur Rutherford at the beginning of the 20th Century as Protons Neutrons and Electrons. Later, as the field of particle physics advanced, even these constituent parts were discovered to have their own components. A quark is one of these components. More than 150 'subatomic' particles have since been discovered and the search still goes on.
The Large Hadron Colider - an enormous machine which 'crashes' subatomic particles together and then tracks and analyses the 'debris' is looking for particles so small that they are sometimes not considered as particle at all but traces of energy. The most exciting search at the moment is for the so called 'Higgs Boson' Which was proposed in the sixties by Scottish physicist Peter Higgs. These particles are considered to be zero mass and, according to Higgs, they are responsible for the phenomenon of mass itself. But that's another story!

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