In fact it is not clear what James Joyce had in mind writing
in
"Finnegans Wake":
- 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.
If that was "quarts", then Mark had to drink beer, a quite big amount, that's six pints!
Anyway the rest of the text is also unclear. Is it a tree? A dog somewhere? A scar or a lesson?
Now, a similar situation is with the quarks: there were only three when they were named by
Gell-Mann in 1964. Now they are six quarks, but in three colors, and, additionally some negative ones, in pink, cyan and yellow.
And no one ever caught them in hand, like those of Muster Mark.
Prof. Arkadiusz Goral, “Meandry Fizyki”,
Wydawnictwo MON, Warszawa (1988)
Explanations: (Oxford Dictionary of Contemporary English and us)
- quart =1/4 gallon
- gallon =3,785 dm3
- bark - 1) sound emitted by a dog; 2) hard, external covering of the tree
- mark - 1) sign on face; 2) letter or digit to valuation
- quark - 1) assignment for Mark Muster in "Finnegan's Wake",
2) basic, beside the leptons, elements of matter: components of mesons (=2 quarks) and baryons (=3 quarks), unable to be isolated, but observable during in high energy collisions of elementary particles.
