
Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann chose the name quark (which is the “squawk” of a gull) from a line in Irish author James Joyce's 1939 book of comic fiction Finnegans Wake (see page 383):
"Three quarks for Muster Mark."
Independently, the physicist George Zweig suggested a similar idea, calling the building-block particles "aces". Not quite as catchy a name, it didn’t take hold and quark became a permanent part of the physics vernacular (and Star Trek Deep Space Nine characters).
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