the.com/quark
the universe's smallest unbluffable poker player — you can never see its hand alone
means A quark is one of the elementary particles that combine to form protons, neutrons, and other particles, never found alone but always bound together inside them.
from Coined by physicist Murray Gell-Mann in the 1960s, who first had the sound in his head and only later found the spelling — borrowing the word from James Joyce's *Finnegans Wake*, where the line "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" caught his ear, conveniently matching the way quarks come in threes inside a proton. Joyce's own "quark" was likely a nonsense rhyme, possibly playing on a German word for a kind of soft curd cheese — so a particle at the heart of all matter is named, at the end of the chain, after a literary joke and maybe some dairy.
- named by
- Gell-Mann, from a nonsense word in Finnegans Wake
- never alone
- confinement means quarks can't exist in isolation
- six flavors
- up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom
- weird charge
- carry fractional charges like one-third or two-thirds
- top heavy
- top quark weighs as much as a gold atom
top quark — discovered at fermilab in 1995, most massive of all quarks at 173 gev
up quark — one of two lightest quarks, makes up most of ordinary matter in protons and neutrons
strange quark — carries strangeness quantum number, found in kaons and lambda particles at cern