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.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
At first, scientists thought the nucleus was composed of electrons and a positively charged particle called a proton. The word proton, like atom, has Greek roots. It stems from the word prōtos, meaning “first,” because protons were thought to be the fundamental unit of matter—until about halfway through the 20th century, that is, when a physicist made a teeny, tiny discovery.
When Caltech physicist Murray Gell-Mann predicted the existence of an even smaller set of particles in 1964, he playfully dubbed them quarks. There’s a rich tradition of whimsical naming in the world of physics, as is the case with “the God particle,” “flavor,” and “charm.”
But according to Gell-Mann’s book, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, the tail was wagging the dog. “When I assigned the name “quark” to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon,” he writes, “I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been ‘kwork.’
Luckily, Gell-Mann had a bit of a literary bent. In one of his occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, he came across the word ‘quark.’
Gell-Mann also predicted the existence of a particle called the omega-minus, which was confirmed in 1964. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his work on the theory of elementary particles.
Gell-Mann was a child prodigy who entered Yale University at the age of 15 and graduated with a B.S. in physics in 1948. He introduced the concept of strangeness, a quantum property that accounted for previously puzzling decay patterns of certain mesons, in 1953.
He also proposed a scheme for classifying subatomic particles into simple orderly arrangements of families, called the Eightfold Way, after Buddha’s Eightfold Path to Enlightenment and bliss, in 1961.
Murray Gell-Mann has significant contributions to the development and understanding of particle physics.