There may be no better-known lines of poetry than these, at least among physicists, thanks to Murray Gell-Mann’s having dubbed the elementary constituents of matter “quarks.” Gell-Mann had come up with the sound “kwork,” but then adopted the spelling in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, partly because “the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature,” as Gell-Mann writes in The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (W. H. Freeman, 1994).
In Dublin this spring, Gell-Mann got a privileged peek at some of Joyce’s original manuscripts. In 1941, after Joyce died, a friend, Paul Léon, broke into the author’s Paris apartment and salvaged his papers, including handwritten notes for Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. The papers, but not Léon, survived the war. They surfaced recently when Léon’s son Alexis was sifting through his father’s belongings, and were purchased in May by the National...
