Quarks Named After James Joyce

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]The word quark >> comes from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

[00:00:05]>> Really?

[00:00:05]>> Yes.

[00:00:06]>> Oh, okay. How so?

[00:00:08]>> Because we found that there were three quarks in the middle of the proton and neutron, >> right?

[00:00:15]>> Okay. Three.

[00:00:17]And there's some rhyme in Finnegan's Wake that says three quarks for muster mark. And so Murray Galman who's one of the original physicists to think about what the particles are in >> in the tiny tiny stuff >> in the tiny tiny particles. Uh he had that phrase in his head >> and then he says three quarks for >> for mustard mark and so it was three because the number three okay except there's more than three there's like you know with the two varieties times three there's six six kinds of cork. So the numbers in the end don't match up.

[00:00:54]>> He he didn't know anything.

[00:00:55]>> He he didn't know. He just started. He just began the investigation. But the word quirk stayed.

[00:01:00]>> Okay. Mhm. Yeah. It's a dumb name.

[00:01:02]>> All right. Um >> well, you can't say what does it look like, >> right?

[00:01:09]>> That's true.

[00:01:10]>> I mean, in my field, we see a nebula that looks like a tarantula, we call it the tarantula nebula, >> right?

[00:01:15]>> We see another nebula looks like North America. We call the North American Nebula.

[00:01:19]>> That's so crazy. If you see a quirk, what are you going to say it looks