Strange Beauty by Johnson George

Author:Johnson, George [Johnson, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76545-1
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2010-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

Perfect. It took triplets of quarks to make the octets and decuplet of the Eightfold Way. Murray was a little bothered that Joyce’s “quark” rhymed with “bark.” He had it in his head that it was supposed to be pronounced “kwork.” But you could read just about anything into Finnegans Wake. Putting on his hat as amateur Joycean, he noted that “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” could also be taken as a call at a tavern for a round of drinks (the novel, after all, is about the drunken dream of a pub owner, H. C. Earwicker). “Three quarts for Muster Mark!” That would be in accord with Murray’s preferred pronunciation. Literary exegesis could be as inventive as particle physics. He was also amused that “quark” in German refers to a kind of soft, smelly cheese and can be slang for “nonsense.”

One day he tried to explain quarks to his old teacher Viki Weisskopf during a phone call to CERN. “Please, Murray,” Viki said, “let us be serious; this is an international call.” About that time, Murray showed a draft of a paper on quarks to Stanley Mandelstam, who worked with Chew at Berkeley. He exclaimed that Murray was trying to start a counterrevolution against the idea of the bootstrap by proposing that there were fundamental particles. Gell-Mann pointed out, as he would many times in the coming years, that nuclear democracy was safe if the fundamental particles were unobservable. He wasn’t quite sure yet what that meant. But it seemed to be the only way to get the idea to fly.

By the end of the year, Gell-Mann was putting the finishing touches on “A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons.” Elegant and succinct, just two pages in length, the paper, like so many of his others, was a model of understatement. The implications and details of the quark scheme are implicit in the equations, not baldly stated, almost as though he were hiding the radical implications.

He opened the paper by paying obligatory homage to the bootstrap. And though he described his new idea using the language of field theory (pretending that the quarks were held together by some kind of hypothetical bosons), he made it clear that this was just a mathematical convenience. He wasn’t making a statement about how the world worked but simply providing a model, a device for making calculations. Everything, thus far, was politically correct. Then, just to get it over with, he described his uglier model involving four integrally charged subunits. But if one were willing to accept the idea of fractional charges, he ventured, a more elegant scheme was at hand. And he proceeded to show the wonderful things one could do with quarks, even citing James Joyce in the footnotes. Suppose quarks come in three varieties, u, d, and s (standing for “up,” “down,” and “strange,” though he didn’t say so in the paper). The up quark has a charge of ⅔; the down quark and the strange quark each have a charge of –⅓.

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