A different sort of religion

[Anville Azote]

On 8/11/06, B C Johnson <bjohnson02 at insightbb.com> wrote:
>
>
> Murray Gell-Mann (born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist who
> received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of
> elementary particles.
> Gell-Mann, and, independently, George Zweig, then went on, in 1964, to
> postulate the quark model. This introduced quarks, the particles of which
> the hadrons were composed, a name coined by Gell-Mann through a reference to
> the book Finnegans Wake, written by James Joyce ("Three quarks for Muster
> Mark!").[citation needed] Zweig had referred to the particles as "aces" but
> Gell-Mann's name caught on.

Gell-Mann actually invented the word "quark" as a bit of euphonious
nonsense, then found a literary source after the fact.  You can look
it up in James Gleick's biography of Gell-Mann's colleague Richard
Feynman, or in the book of Feynman's letters edited by his daughter
Michelle (amongst probably other places).

-anv.