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News & ArtsTuesday, September 15, 2009
Science The Joyce of Science
Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 9:26 AM
Because it is Murray Gell-Mann's birthday, let's return to the strange, obscure, darkling passage that gave him the spelling for the word that is now attached to the fundamental stuff of all that matters, "quark":
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.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
The image is from lifesundeath.
1
Sure it's not from the quark cheese his parents likely ate, back in Czernowitz?
www.flickr.com/
photos/rooreynolds/
/1231343599/
www.flickr.com/
photos/rooreynolds/
/1231343599/
3
And what are the two words with which Mr. Joyce greeted the 20th Century? The decadent echoes of Mr. Beethoven's opening to his Heroica: Stately, plump...
4
I love quarks. I heard that the top quark and bottom quark were originally named truth quark and beauty quark which i find lovely. They were made to change it (probably by the guy who yells at you to get off his lawn - Clint Eastwood?). They should have left them with those names! The other 4 are up, down, charm,and strange. So they at least got to keep two of them named oddly. (:=
5
I got nothing against Gell-Mann, or Joyce, or even the name "quark", but it's a shame that in dubbing the particle a "quark", Gell-Mann started a twenty-year fad of cutesy-pie nomenclature in physics. Charm! Beauty! Strangeness! Gosh how clever, and how sweet to see the the suppposedly emotionless scientists come up with such hilarious names! Blech. Physicists did better in the 19th century, when they coined a bunch of unintentionally evocative terminology. From classical electromagnetics, for instance, there is a quantity called the "reluctance". Or a better example, from geometric optics, the "circle of least confusion." To me, the phrase has always seemed particularly wistful. See, we have no hope of faithfully bringing reality into focus with our vaunted scientific method. The best we can hope for is to find our way, through our best efforts, into the circle of least confusion.
8
Eric from Boulder, thank you for introducing me to the phrase "circle of least confusion". I love it!
9
ahem. Should be "now attached to the fundamental stuff of < 5% of all that matters."
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_ma…
10
You are welcome, Irena.
To a list of old-timey physics terms, I should add "frustration", a concept from the statistical mechanics of disorder. Who hasn't experienced the sweet frustration asociated with encountering someone with a magnetic reluctance? What I like about terminology like that is the crusty old physicists who invented it weren't trying to be cute.
To a list of old-timey physics terms, I should add "frustration", a concept from the statistical mechanics of disorder. Who hasn't experienced the sweet frustration asociated with encountering someone with a magnetic reluctance? What I like about terminology like that is the crusty old physicists who invented it weren't trying to be cute.
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