Quotes About Quarks

Studies show that neurotic and psychiatric disorders are more common among those who attempt to keep conscious control of life and suppress its unwelcome quirks. Sanity, paradoxically, may lie in accepting that you are not in control.

The subcomponents were at first called different things, but eventually the physics community settled on the term 'quarks' chosen by Murray Gell-Mann for the way it sounded to him. He spotted the word in a passage from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "Three quarks for Muster Mark's". As there are three quarks each in protons and neutrons (and in all particles in the category called baryons), the moniker seemed appropriate.