noun, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
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"A simpler and more elegant scheme can be constructed if we allow non-integral values for the charges. We can dispense entirely with the basic baryon b if we assign to the triplet t the following properties: spin #92;frac#123;1#125;#123;2#125;, z#61;#123;-#92;frac#123;1#125;#123;3"
"Two functions are provided to convert between strings and quarks: XrmStringToQuark and XrmQuarkToString […] The second takes a quark as its parameter and returns a pointer to its associated string; it is used primarily for debugging and runtime error messages."
"Tom, could you explain to me what a quark is?"
In the Standard Model, one of a number of elementary subatomic particles having fractional electric charge that forms matter. They are theorized not to exist in isolation, but only in combinations in hadrons such as neutrons and protons or in quark–gluon plasmas.
Common synonyms include: atom, dairy curd, electron, elementary particle, fresh cheese, fundamental particle.
Tom, could you explain to me what a quark is?
Pronounced /kwɑːk/.
Etymology 1 sense 1 (“subatomic particle”) was coined by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) in 1963, apparently an arbitrary word. Subsequently, in a letter dated 27 June 1978 to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, Gell-Mann associated the word with the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and indicated that he pronounced the word /kwɔɹk/, reasoning that the sentence referred to a call in a pub for “three quarts”. However, the context in the book indicates that quark is probably a variant of quawk (“harsh call of a bird”) and was intended by Joyce to be pronounced /kwɑːk/, the modern pronunciation.
[Alt: A spoonful of quark cheese served with tomato slices on a plate] Borrowed from German Quark (“cottage cheese; curds; curd cheese”), from late Middle High German twarc, from a West Slavic language, possibly Lower Sorbian twarog (compare Polish twaróg), from Proto-Slavic *tvarogъ (“quark”), probably related to *tvorìti (“to make”), from Proto-Indo-European *twerH- (“to enclose, fence in; to grab, seize”). Doublet of tvorog.
Onomatopoeic, from the sound of the squawk.