Thursday, April 11, 2013

Three Quarks for Muster Mark

I'll be the first to admit this isn't a physics fact as much as historical trivia, but I think it's interesting nonetheless.
I recently checked out a book called The Quark Model, edited by J. J. J. Kokkedee. I didn't realize until I opened it and read the preface that it was published in 1969, when quarks were still a cute idea rather than a confirmed part of the Standard Model. In any case, this book also has Murray Gell-Mann's original paper proposing quarks. I was surprised to find it was less than two pages long, at least half of which was entirely intelligible to the moderately-educated reader (minimal quantum field theory knowledge necessary for a general understanding, in any case). Furthermore, I'd previously heard that quarks were named after a phrase from Finnegan's Wake (three quarks for Muster Mark), but it's not every day that you see a work of literature cited in a particle physics paper. Sure enough, though, reference six of eight in this groundbreaking article is to James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. It's nice to see that physicists (and the people who publish their papers) have a sense of humor. It made me smile, in any case.

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