Quark (pronounced kwawrk or kwahrk)
(1) In physics, any of a set of six hypothetical
elementary particles (together with their antiparticles), said to be the
fundamental units which combine to make up the subatomic particles known as
hadrons (baryons, such as neutrons and protons, and mesons) but unable to exist
in isolation.
(2) A soft creamy cheese, eaten throughout northern,
central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe as well as the Low Countries, very
similar to cottage cheese though not usually made with rennet
(3) In computer operating systems, an integer that
uniquely identifies a text string.
(4) In informal use in the British Falkland Islands, the
name given to the black-crowned night heron, Nycticorax nycticorax, the origin
onomatopoeic, from the sound of the bird’s squawk.
(5) In Old & Middle English onomatopoeic slang, to
croak (obsolete).
1963: A coining by US physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019),
describing the discovery for which he would be awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in
Physics. The English word quark appears
un-adapted in the scientific lexicon of just about every language on Earth but
the Italians invented the pleasing quarkonio,
the construct being quark + -onium (termination
of positronium), a meson consisting of a charm quark or a bottom quark and its
own antiquark and consequently devoid of flavor (the name given to different
versions of the same type of particle). The
German noun Quark (curds, (and in
slang “trivial nonsense”)) has been suggested as Dr Gell-Mann’s inspiration (Gell-Mann's
parents were from the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
The German form was from the late Middle High German twarc, from the Old Church Slavonic tvarogu (curds, cottage cheese), from a suffixed
form of the primitive Indo-European root teue-
(to swell), the source also of the Greek tyros
(cheese). Russian-American physicist George
Zweig (b 1937) who (independently of Gell-Mann) co-proposed the theory of
quarks, called them aces because his calculations suggested there were four of
them.
Gell-Mann’s linguistic choice prevailed but the
etymological speculation about quark ran as a minor footnote in the history of
high-energy physics, interest stimulated after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. From the beginning the physicist’s quark rhymed
with "cork" but Gell-Mann subsequently came across quark in James
Joyce’s (1882-1941) difficult novel Finnegans
Wake and the without literary antecedent, it may thus have entered the
scientific discourse as “kwork”. Because
of the context in which Joyce placed quark in the novel, Gell-Mann deduced the
author intended it to rhyme with “Mark” & “Bark” and among Joyceians, there’s
long been discussion about whether the source was the Old & Middle English
slang meaning “croak” or the German Quark which had a technical meaning in cheese
production but also was a popular colloquial term for "trivial nonsense”
in the sense of “talking nonsense”.
Joyce had certainly visited parts of Germany where the term was in use
but no notes have ever been uncovered which would confirm the origin.
It’s still scientific orthodoxy there are six
quarks but there may be more. They are
known as flavors and are named (1) up, (2) down, (3) strange, (4) charmed, (5) bottom
& (6) top, each manifesting in three colors, (1) red, (2) green & (3)
blue. The use of colors as a convention
seems a curious choice because, not falling within the wavelength of visible
light, quarks cannot possess the quality of a color in the conventional sense
of the word. However, red, green and
blue are probably more mnemonic that the traditional constructions from the
Ancient Greek. Neutrons & protons
are each made from three quarks, one of each color, a neutron being (2 x down +
1 x up) and a proton (2 x up + 1 x down).
Particles can be assembled using the other quarks but the resulting mass
is massively larger and rapidly they decay into protons and neutrons. Until the experiments of the early 1960s which
at high-speed collided protons with electrons or other protons, it was thought
neutrons & protons were fundamental particles. It was during the observations of these collisions
that it became understood quarks were the building blocks.
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