Finnegans Wake has long been a source of inspiration for creative minds, but a recent discovery (recent for me) that the word quark originated in Joyce's work came as a surprise. Murray Gell-Man, one of the two independent physicists who proposed the theory of quarks, was actually inspired by a passage from the Wake. Although Gell-Man first thought of the term as the sound made by ducks, he couldn't decide on the exact spelling. However, in 1963, he was flipping through Finnegan's Wake (apparently he often did this, suggesting a scientific mind appropriately attuned to the nonsense of the universe; no wonder he thought up quarks), when he came across the word quark on page 383. "Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure has not got much of a bark/And sure any he has it's all beside the mark" read the passage, enigmatically. Although, as Gell-Man points out in his book The Quark and the Jaguar, quark was obviously meant to rhyme with Mark and bark, he decided to pronounce it kwork. He was drawn to the idea that most words in the Wake have multiple meanings and sources. Another draw? Quarks appear in threes in nature as well. The website Indopedia suggests that this source for quark is "less than illuminating", but as usual, that's what makes Finnegans Wake both fascinating and frustrating. Today the word quark includes the following meanings: fresh unripened cheese; a punk song by Die Artze, a microkernel operating system, an American sci fi sitcom from the '70s, an American '70's science magazine, and perhaps most improbably, a last constituent of matter. For instance, protons are made of three quarks. Some of the varieties of quarks include up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. James Joyce would surely approve.
