2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/36760On the occasion of a symposium honoring my collegue Adrian Melissinos, I gave an informal, personal review of bottom quark physics. This paper is a writeup of that talk. I first summarize the early days, the decade from the discovery through the determination of the b quark's rough features. I note a change in objective which occurred around 1990, with the new emphasis being USING the b quark, to probe the Standard Model and to search for physics `beyond the Standard Model'. I review the flavor sector of the Standard Model, showing why the b quark is such a useful probe. I then discuss three topics of current interest: the determination of V_ub; studies of rare hadronic B decays; and the radiative penguin decay b -> s gamma.Talk given at Symposium on Probing Luminous and Dark Matter, honoring Adrian Melissinos, Rochester, October, 1999. Submitted to conference proceedings, World Scientific, 2000High Energy Physics - Experimenttext