What actually is quark? (Not the CERN one)
Large flavored quark
Submitted 2 months ago by sjmarf@sh.itjust.works to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/a22327a0-7f15-41d6-966f-4ff5bbbe17a9.png
Comments
mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
kaida@feddit.org 2 months ago
You might know it as curd (cheese)
manucode@infosec.pub 2 months ago
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The physicist who named the particle apparently liked to come up with nonsense words in his head. Later, when trying to decide the spelling, he came across a quote by James Joyce and spelled it “Quark”. Unfortunately, the particle rhymes with fork, while the german cheese rhymes with Mark.
According to his own account he was in the habit of using names like “squeak” and “squork” for peculiar objects, and “quork” (rhyming with pork) came out at the time. Some months later, he came across a line from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:
Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
The line struck him as appropriate, since the hypothetical particles came in threes, and he adopted Joyce’s spelling for his “quork.” Joyce clearly meant quark to rhyme with Mark, bark, park, and so forth, but Gell-Mann worked out a rationale for his own pronunciation based on the vowel of the word quart: he told researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary that he imagined Joyce’s line “Three quarks for Muster Mark” to be a variation of a pub owner’s call of “Three quarts for Mister Mark.” Joyce himself apparently was thinking of a German word for a dairy product resembling cottage cheese; it is also used as a synonym for quatsch, meaning “trivial nonsense.”
www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/quark
However, there is another interpretation of the quote.
This passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, part of a scurrilous 13-line poem directed against King Mark, the cuckolded husband in the Tristan legend, has left its mark on modern physics. The poem and the accompanying prose are packed with names of birds and words suggestive of birds, and the poem is a squawk against the king that suggests the cawing of a crow. The word quark comes from the standard English verb quark, meaning “to caw, croak,” and also from the dialectal verb quawk, meaning “to caw, screech like a bird.”
www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=quark
This sounds very learned and all, but I can’t find that standard English verb in the dictionary.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I would have sent them to ds9, at least they have a holodeck there.
Iheartcheese@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Only one working? Fucking Rom.
stoy@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Come on, it’s not his fault, if Quark just bought better spatulas it would be fine
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It used to be, you got 3 quarks for a mark, but then it was 6 quarks, because the euro was 2 marks. Now you only get 2 quarks, though, because of inflation. It’s always just up and down. Stupid cosmologists.
Toes@ani.social 2 months ago
So silly!
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
A strange joke, but quite charming
sevenism@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
You lepton that quick
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m not trying to be hadron you, but this joke needs to be baryon’d
notaviking@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Joke had its up an down
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This reference is scraping the bottom of the barrel.