FoundingBrian Lester and Nick Gilbert chartered the FIRST Robotics Club at the Early College at Guilford in the summer of 2004 as a way to harness and train the engineering skills of our student body. The Robotics club was able to raise enough money to register for the 2005 Competition, becoming Team 1533. Origin of the Name and LogoSeveral students participating in the Robotics Club were taking Classical and Modern Physics at Guilford College, which introduced them to particle physics. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, everything is made of quarks and leptons; the leptons are particles such as electrons that do not combine with other particles, while the quarks are the six basic building blocks that make up everything. The Standard Model says that there are six ‘flavors’ of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange. As of now, we believe that there are two common types of quark groupings, mesons (a pair of a quark and an antiquark interacting to form an ‘elementary particle’) and baryons (a group of three quarks interacting with each other to form an ‘elementary particle’). Because of the different quarks available and the different energy states of the particles there are many possible combination of the quarks; but only one that contains three strange quarks: the Omega particle. The Omega particle is denoted with a capital Omega (Ω). While our team thought of names and logos, we could find no name as intriguing that had a good story behind it; therefore we began drawing logos for triple strange. Our logo, shown below, was the result of linking three capital Omegas about an equilateral triangle. Origin of Our Motto
"Unusually Good at the Impossible"The team motto was the result of the discussion of the strange quark. The students taking physics explained why the strange particle is called ‘strange.’ In bubble chamber experiments, particles exiting a particle accelerator will pass through a pure gas and ionize molecules as they pass through, leaving a track of all of the charged particles. Certain particles leave known tracks, and one day there was an unexplained event that occurred in the bubble chamber. The decay of a neutral particle took a larger time than was thought possible. To adjust the model a conservation law was made to conserve the strangeness of a particle. Each particle is assigned a strangeness number (equal to the number of strange quarks in the particle) and the reaction is only able to happen if strangeness number stays the same or changes by one. Because the physicists were able to formulate a conservation law that agreed with reality (a challenging task since we can't even see these particles), we decided that “Unusually Good at the Impossible” was a catchy motto describing our ability to overcome challenging tasks. |
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