Day 18 change from u/HigHurtenflurst420:

Give the W boson a Wario mustache and give the Z boson a Waluigi mustache and flip the L upside down

Day 17 change from u/4thdigitalfootprint:

Remove n from photon and add a camera instead

art source

Day 16 change from u/InsuranceSad1754:

Change the generations from I, II, III to Boomer, Millennial, GenZ and give the fermions appropriate facial hair for their generation.

Day 15 change from u/harpswtf:

And u/Aggressive_Hall755:

The price is the estimated inflation adjusted cost it took to directly discover the particle. It amounts the total cost for the accelerators, equipment, detectors and so on that were used to explicitly search for said particle. Some prices are quite high because of the nature of modern high energy physics where experiments are not only built to discover one single particle but have a vast amount of science they want to cover. For example J. J. Thomson built his cathode-ray experiment to only search for the electron. Meanwhile megaprojects such as PETRA, the SPPS and the LHC had many more goals in mind and ultimately achieved a vast amount of scientific discoveries aside from the discovery of their respective particle. That is why saying that the discovery of the Higgs was $15B is not the full picture because there was a vast amount of scientific knowledge gained by the LHC aside the Higgs Boson thanks to those $7B.

The asterisks are there to symbolize that some particles were discovered by the same experiment and had therefor the same "price". It felt wrong to divide the total price between the particles because if the down quark wouldn't have been discovered it would have taken still the same price to discover the up quark. (Tomorrow I'll take out the asterisks for the next post for simplicity's sake).

• Electron: Discovery by J.J. Thomson. Very speculative cost of ~£400 (1987) for his tabletop experiment. Large Ruhmkorff coil + vacuum pumps + tubes + magnets. Rough estimate derived from - Brenni, Paolo. Very Large Induction Coils.
• Photon: First direct experimental evidence by Arthur Compton via Compton X-ray scattering. Very speculative cost of ~$3,000 (1923) derived from a conservative and very rough prices for comparable lab devices which were in the low thousands of dollars. Coolidge X-ray tube, spectrometer, ion chambers were needed.
• Muon: Anderson & Neddermeyer via cosmic-ray cloud-chamber. From the The Autobiography of Carl David Anderson: “Anderson commented on the cost of the project to find the muon at Caltech in the early days of subatomic physics – ‘To find the positive electron and the two muons cost about $15,000 (1936).’”
• Tau: Discovered by SPEAR (SLAC) + Mark I. Storage ring built for e⁺e⁻ spectroscopy including lepton searches. Accelerator + Detector cost was $6–$7M (1970s)
• Electron Neutrino: Discovered at the Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines. A reactor inverse-beta experiment. "Small" scale experiment probably between $10k - $100k (1953)
• Muon Neutrino: Discovered at Brookhaven AGS “two-neutrino” experiment. From the "ALTERNATING GRADIENT SYNCHROTRON PROJEСТ CONSTRUCTION COMPLETION REPORT" the cost for the accelerator + Detector was roughly $33M (1960)
• Tau Neutrino: Discovered at DONUT (Fermilab). the whole physiscs program of Fermilab in the 90s is estimated to have been $1–$2M (late-1990s)
• Up, Down and Strange quarks: All 3 discovered at SLAC deep-inelastic scattering. The first two in 1968 and the later 1964–70s. Cost for the SCLAC Linac was $114M (1960s) + spectrometers [From "Funding Realities: Requirements for Successful Participation in Large-Scale Science"]
• Charm quark: Discovery of J/ψ Meson at SPEAR (SLAC) and Brookhaven. SPEAR cost $5–7M (1974) and BNL program cost $3–7M (1974). One could also add to this the total cost of the SLAC Linac andf the Brookhaven facilities but I didn't because it was "just" and upgraded to existing infrastructure that discovered the charm quark so it felt "wrong" to do it. But all of these costs are huge speculations so it is what it is. If you want me to change it I can do it.
• Bottom quark: Discovered the Y meson at Fermilab fixed-target. Cost for the main ring + spectrometeres was roughly $38 M – $77 M (1977)
• Top quark: Discovered at Tevatron by CDF and DØ. Tevatron build ≈$120M (1980s) + CDF ≈$115M + DØ ≈$90M (1980s–90s)
• Gluon; Discovery at PETRA (DESY). The PETRA synchrotron had a cost of roughly 528M DM (Deutsche Mark) in the late 70s
• W and Z bosons: Discovered by CERN SPPS collider at UA1 and UA2. Construction costs for SPPS were ~1.15 billion Swiss francs. To that you would then need to add the cost of both detectors.
• Higgs Boson: Dicopvered by CERN LHC at ATLAS and CMS. It had an estimated total cost of $7.15B = LHC + ATLAS + CMS costs

Hey guys I'm back! From today on the regular schedule will continue

Day 13 change from u/halfajack:

Boson -> Bozo, its time has come