NOVA x Network

For details on this + winter course being led by Harvard instructors Imtisaal Mian & Rima Rebei in Doha, 🇶🇦 send us a DM!

How Murray Gell-Mann Found “Quark” in Literature

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann coined the term “quark” while developing a model to classify hadrons (protons and neutrons). He had been pronouncing a made-up word “kwork” in his mind but lacked a spelling.

The breakthrough came when he read “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. This serendipitous discovery provided both the spelling and a fitting connection to the three types of fundamental particles in his model.

When asked about the naming Gell-Mann sometimes joked about using Joyce’s playful language for something as serious as particle physics.

Source:

Prepare for the week.

Data Landscapes.

Founder of Renaissance Technologies,
Jim Simons, on being guided by beauty.

Numbers 2-10 visualized with 4 different levels of recursion. It’s almost like describing an electrons position around the atomic center of mass in probability terms science. Photo from

The Boltzmann machine can be used to classify images or create new examples of the type of pattern on which it was trained.

Geometry is the archetype.

The most act is the act of creating yourself.

The universe is a song 🎧