Quark Quotes

Quark-antiquark collisions cannot be realized directly since free quarks are not available. The closest substitute is to use collisions between protons and antiprotons. ~ Carlo Rubbia

The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant, a ~ 1/137, as manifested in the factor-of-137 spacings between the classical electron radius, electron Compton radius, and Bohr orbit radius. ... An a-quantized mass-generation grid extends accurately from the electron all the way to the top quark t, and leads to a corresponding a-quantized particle lifetime grid. ~ Malcolm H. Mac Gregor

My clothes are made of monosodium glutamate and hexachlorophene. My food is made of polyester, rayon and lurex. My rug lotions contain vitamins. Do my vitamins feature cleaning agents? I hope so. My brain is gimmicked by a microprocessor the size of a quark, and costing ten pee and running the whole deal. I am made of - junk, I'm just junk. ~ Martin Amis

Our view is that Quark can make almost everything smart. We'll show you some things that you would never have thought could become smart and communicate. ~ Brian Krzanich

Three quarks for Muster Mark! ~ James Joyce

For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. ~ Alan Moore

What do you mean, words whose meanings evolved?" asked Alif. "That doesn't make sense. The Quran is the Quran."
Vikram folded his legs-Alif did not watch this operation closely-and smiled at his audience.
"The convert will understand. How do they translate ذرة in your English interpretation?"
"Atom," said the convert.
You don't find that strange, considering atoms were unknown in the sixth century?"
The convert chewed her lip. "I never thought of that," she said.
"You're right. There's no way atom is the original meaning of that word."
"Ah." Vikram held up two fingers in a sign of benediction. He looked, Alif thought, like some demonic caricature of a saint. "But it is. In the twentieth century, atom became the original meaning of ذرة, because an atom was the tiniest object known to man. Then man split the atom. Today, the original meaning might be hadron. But why stop there? Tomorrow, it might be quark. In a hundred years, some vanishingly small object so foreign to the human mind that only Adam remembers its name. Each of those will be the original meaning of ذرة.
Alif snorted. "That's impossible. ذرة must refer to some fundamental thing. It's attached to an object."
"Yes it is. The smallest indivisible particle. That is the meaning packaged in the word. No part of it lifts out-it does not mean smallest, nor indivisible, nor particle, but all those things at once. Thus, in man's infancy, ذرة was a grain of sand. Then a mote of du ~ G. Willow Wilson

I saw the whole universe laid out before me, a vast shining machine of indescribable beauty and complexity. Its design was too intricate for me to understand, and I knew I could never begin to grasp more than the smallest idea of its purpose. But I sensed that every part of it, from quark to quasar, was unique and - in some mysterious way - significant. ~ R. J. Anderson

Come, dry your eyes, for you are LIFE, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.
Dry your eyes, and let's go home. ~ Alan Moore

In fact, meta- and particle physicists have more in common than one might suppose: both tug, if in slightly different directions, at the knots which hold the cosmos together, both look beyond the immediate world of sense perception into one where cause can only be deduced from effect - a quark is as invisible as an angel; both are confronted by Manichaean polarities - miracles and black magic, cheap energy versus total destruction. ~ Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Quarks come in six "flavors" that were given the rather arbitrary names: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. Protons, for instance, are made of two up quarks and one down quark, while neutrons consist of two down quarks and one up quark. Other than ordinary electric charge, quarks possess another type of charge, which has been fancifully called color, even though it has nothing to do with anything we can see. In the same way that the electric charge lies at the root of electromagnetic forces, color originates the strong nuclear force. Each quark flavor comes in three different colors, conventionally called red, green, and blue. There are, therefore, eighteen different quarks. ~ Mario Livio

an­ti­quarks? Why are there not equal num­bers of each? It is cer­tain­ly for­tu­nate for us that the num­bers are un­equal be ear­ly uni­verse and left a uni­verse filled with ra­di­ation but hard­ly any mat­ter. There would then have been no galax­ies, stars, or plan­ets on which hu­man life could have de­vel­oped. ~ Stephen Hawking

I'd finally reached the end of myself, all my self-reliance and denial and pride unraveling into nothingness, leaving only a blank Alison-shaped space behind. It was finished. I was done.
But just as I felt myself dissolving on the tide of my own self-condemnation, the dark waves receded, and I floated into a celestial calm.
I saw the whole universe laid out before me, a vast shining machine of indescribable beauty and complexity. Its design was too intricate for me to understand, and I knew I could never begin to grasp more than the smallest idea of its purpose. But I sensed that every part of it, from quark to quasar, was unique and - in some mysterious way - significant.
I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a peircing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase - nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it.
I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a bli ~ R.J. Anderson

The top quark was discovered in 1995, and since then, the Higgs has become our obsession because the standard model was incomplete without it. ~ Fabiola Gianotti

We had to understand things like why the top quark was so heavy and the electron is so light. The Higgs is a big, important step. ~ Fabiola Gianotti

In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature. ~ Murray Gell-Mann

We called the new [fourth] quark the "charmed quark" because we were pleased, and fascinated by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world. "Charm" also means a "a magical device to avert evil," and in 1970 it was realized that the old three quark theory ran into very serious problems ... As if by magic the existence of the charmed quark would [solve those problems]. ~ Sheldon Lee Glashow

Every cell in your body, she said, was a quark, a sort of vibrating string. And through their thoughts and intentions, human beings had an almost magnetic power to attract similar strings out in the universe. As the number and intensity of these attracted strings build, a critical mass is reached and the want, whatever that may be, comes into being. Most of us are more powerful than we know. We are each in charge of our own vibrating energy. ~ Karen McQuestion

For five hundred dollars, I'll name a subatomic particle after you. Some of my satisfied customers include Arthur C. Quark and George Meson. ~ Scott Adams

Scientific vocabulary can be so weird. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has just recorded an example of a subatomic particle called the anti-beauty quark. Could it be that ugly people now have something tangible to blame? ~ Michael Quinion

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time. ~ David Eagleman

Quark!"--the Quarkbeast ~ Jasper Fforde