Two readers on quarks:
Reader #1
Dear Jonah,
It was Murray Gell-Mann, the guy behind most of the early advances in this field (known as Quantum Chromodynamics or QCD) that coined the ‘quark’ name. The line is actually at the start of Chap 12 (or II.4). The relevant passage is ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark/And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark./But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn’t un be a sky of a lark/To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark/And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?’
Quarks come in three different ‘colours’ – ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘blue’, hence chromodynamics as opposed to electrodynamics which describes how things like electrons behave. Quarks also come in six different ‘flavours’ – up, down, charm, strange, bottom and top. In addition, there’s eight different kinds of gluons (tagged by Gell-Mann as the ‘Eightfold Way’), which are the particles that ‘glue’ quarks together to make things like protons, and yes, pentaquarks. It’s really rather beautiful the way it all hangs together – unfortunately a deep understanding of the subject requires rather more mathematics than I have (and I have advanced degrees in Physics and Engineering).
Note that quark is also a type of German soft cheese, and colour and flavour above are just tags for certain properties of the particles.
N.B. There’s contention over whether quark is pronounced to rhyme with ‘park’ or ‘pork’.
Reader #2
Dear Mr. Goldberg,
The word quark was indeed taken from Finnegans Wake [sic; there is
no apostrophe in the title]. The physicist Murray Gell-Mann was familiar with the book. He took the word to name what he considered at the time to most likely be calculational devices that had no real, physical existence. Only later, through the work of others mainly, was it found that they are indeed elementary particles. The actual line from Finnegans Wake is: “Three quarks for Muster Mark/ Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark/ And sure any he has is all beside the mark.” Apparently, Joyce meant the word quark to mean the sound of a bird, such as “to caw, to croak.” But, with Finnegans Wake, one can never be sure. Interestingly, Gell-Mann, and subsequently other physicists following his lead, pronounce the word as “kwork”, rather than “kwark” which would seem to have been Joyce’s intent
in the rhyme.