Trivia
HardWhich Novelist Indirectly Contributed To Particle Physics?
Answer:James Joyce
A quark is an elementary particle that makes up hadrons–the most stable and familiar of which are protons and neutrons which make up the atomic nucleus. The quark model was interdependently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964 and named by Gell-Mann.
In his 1995 book The Quark and the Jaguar Gell-Mann explained how a reading of a James Joyce novel helped him find the perfect way to spell quark:
In 1963, when I assigned the name “quark” to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been “kwork”. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word “quark” in the phrase “Three quarks for Muster Mark”. Since “quark” (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with “Mark”, as well as “bark” and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as “kwork”. But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the “portmanteau” words in “Through the Looking-Glass”. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry “Three quarks for Muster Mark” might be “Three quarts for Mister Mark”, in which case the pronunciation “kwork” would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.
Had Gell-Man’s publications not received more attention than Zweig’s, we would have ended up with Zweig’s proposed name for the tiny particle: Ace.
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