Enigmatic quarks


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 catched them by hands, like Mark.


Explanations:
Quart  =1/4 gallon
Gallon =3,785 dm3
bark - 1) sound emmited by a dog; 2) hard, external covering of the tree
mark - 1) sign on face; 2) letter or digit to valuation
quark - 1) assigment for Mark Muster in "Finnegan's Wake", 2) basic, beside the leptons, elements of matter: components of mesons (=2 quarks) and barions (=3 quarks), unable to be isolated, but observable during in high energy colisions of elementary particles.



© GK