Important Notice: Our web hosting provider recently started charging us for additional visits, which was unexpected. In response, we're seeking donations. Depending on the situation, we may explore different monetization options for our Community and Expert Contributors. It's crucial to provide more returns for their expertise and offer more Expert Validated Answers or AI Validated Answers. Learn more about our hosting issue here.

What is “Quarq”?

April 26, 2017quarq

0

Posted

What is “Quarq”?

1 Answer

0

Posted

“Quarq” is just a hiply misspelled word. A quark is a subatomic particle (which, by the way, is really fast). The word “quark” originated from the 1939 novel “Finnegans Wake” in the line: Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann enjoyed the allusion to three quarks and applied the term to physics, as the Standard Model predicts three generations of elementary particles. Quarks can have one of two fractional electric charges (+2/3 or -1/3), yielding six “flavors”: Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Bottom, and the elusive Top quark. Top and Bottom were originally called Truth and Beauty, but that got a bit lame after the Truth quark proved difficult to find and folks started saying “the quark model has no truth”. This didn’t go over so well in some circles, so Top and Bottom became the preferred terminology.