Hadronic production of charmed and other favorite particles

We review well known facts about charmed particles (i) that in the G.I.M. model the expected lifetime of a charmed particle is in the range (4×10⁻¹³–2×⁻¹²) seconds (ii) that charm production cross‐sections in the (5∠20) μb range for 400 GeV proton‐proton interactions are expected from quantum chromodynamics. We show that accumulating (and seemingly contradictory!) information regarding charmed particle lifetimes and cross‐sections from counter, beam‐dump and accelerator or cosmic‐ray emulsion experiments converges on values consistent with these theoretical prejudices. The confirmation of perturbative Q.C.D. for calculating hadronic cross‐sections of heavy particles is good news for the future hadron colliders discussed at this conferences: they might not only discover the weak intermediate bosons but also the t‐quark and possibly the next flavor doublet.