The Universe Inside You

Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark!’ The way quarks come in threes made the text very apt, so Gell-Mann adopted the spelling, even though it didn’t fit his pronunciation.

This odd name, quark, is often pronounced to rhyme with lark, but when American physicist Murray Gell-Mann dreamed up the idea, he wanted it to rhyme with cork. He came up with that ‘kwork’ sound without thinking about how to spell it. But then he came across a line in James