Examining which research is the most important?

Another idea could be they have more of the Gamma-Ray tasks and need to get thru them and giving more credit for them does that for some people.

There are Boinc Projects paying huge credits for a small amount of time spent crunching, they have their reasons for it but don't always express them publicly. My personal guess is some want to make as big an impact as they can while they can. Other projects pay far fewer credits per task and their stated idea is to be a steady eddie and not have the peaks of a ton of people coming for the credits and then leaving. Giving out more credits can also be a bad thing for a project if they don't understand and prepare for the 'credit whores' who crunch just because they look at the numbers climb. Some projects have crashed, and some continue to crash, as more and more people bring more and more resources to the project, they just can't handle the load. That often leads to less credits being given out to slow down the number of new people signing up or those staying or the project going away because they just don't have the cash flow to keep buying newer and faster hardware.

There are also BRP tasks available here at Einstein for people with ARM(raspberry pi) devices, those tasks take over 10k seconds and they give out 62 credits for each one. Does that mean they don't need those tasks crunched at all, or barely?  IMHO as long as Einstein doesn't go to the Seti plan of "credit new" then I'm okay with however they do it.

[long winded aside, it's a Friday with time to spare]

The origin of the use of the word quark is said to come from the phrase "Three quarks for muster Mark !", mentioned in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Joyce doesn't define what a quark is. The three is significant though, that being the number within a proton or neutron. Richard Feynman had a related idea of partons, a useful way of looking at collisions involving hadrons eg. electrons hitting protons. It was Murray Gel-Mann who came up with the initial quark model. The symmetries in that model exclude single quarks and indeed none have been seen. It's a relativistic thingy. If you put enough energy into a collision in order separate a free quark from some bound state with others : you just wind up creating quark/anti-quark pairs which then can be detected in composite particles of two's and three's or as quark jets.

I am amazed that particle physicists can say so much about these wee little things via bashing them together and seeing what emerges. The everyday analogy would be to crash cars together at high velocity and deduce their design & structure by examining still photographs of all the pieces as they fly off.

The apex of this style of investigation is of course the discovery of the Higgs Boson. You don't see Higgs tracks in detectors either, one deduces their existence via statistical analysis of collisions of sufficiently high energy. The Higgs decays in many ways to more ordinary particles in a really brief instant. The analogy here is to deduce a grenade's pre-explosion structure by the shrapnel it produces.

One big hole in physics at the moment is how/where to place to place gravity in such particle schemes. One would think that just inventing a graviton - the supposed quantum of the gravitational field - would do it. But there is a plague of problems with that. For instance it turns out that one can't consistently localise energy in gravitational interactions, the energy is a property of the entire field, and that is implicit in General Relativity. Roughly speaking one can say "the Earth falls towards the Moon" or "the Moon falls towards the Earth" equally validly, so an observer on one of those bodies is going to measure the other body as the one doing the accelerating. This is supposedly true right down to the domain of small dimensions. Furthermore gravity is a distortion of the space & time measurements that different observers compare. The Standard Model of particle fields leave space and time alone with only Special Relativity corrections when comparing viewpoints.

As GR has been such a successful theory many are loathe to go up against it. My personal idea, just shooting the breeze here, is that there needs to be a theory of gravity intermediate b/w the cosmic and the atomic scales. There would be an explicit scaling factor that causes gravity to go to zero strength over small distances ( leaving the success the Standard model un-opposed ), but going to the standard inverse square approximation of Newton as separations increase ( leaving the success of GR un-opposed ). But the key thing is to construct a quantitative model, and that means some fancy mathematics. I have a name at least : the Duck Soup Model, because I duck the hard questions and leave a messy mathematical soup ... 

[/long winded aside, it's a Friday with time to spare] 

Cheers, Mike.

That would have to be about the silliest movie I've ever seen, but delightful at that. A witty political parody, the brothers at their apex. :-)

[on topic]Another reason to care about credit is for the sheer sake of optimising it. A challenge to push one's hardware and tinker for fun.[/on topic]

Cheers, Mike.