Quarks

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  • cheers
  • quark: approximation of the sound of sea gulls, who are mocking King Mark of Cornwall with their song
  • quark (German): curd, as of cheese
  • corks
  • quarts: i.e., of beer; an order in HCE's pub

Commentary

The American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize for Physics laureate, gave the name of "quarks" to one of the two types of fundamental particles from which the matter is made up (the other type are the leptons). He borrowed the name from this chapter of Finnegans Wake.

Curiously enough, "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" matches one of the actual quantities in which physical quarks can be found: associated in a number of three in baryons (or two in mesons), and never individually.

See "quark" in Wikipedia.