Gell-Mann Meets Muster Mark, Honors Hamilton

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 Library of Ireland for roughly $12.2 million.

Gell-Mann will be back in Ireland this month to deliver the Royal Irish Academy’s inaugural Hamilton Lecture at Trinity College Dublin. “They are celebrating Hamilton’s quaternions, which are beautiful and mathematically interesting, even though they never proved to be of that much use for physics,” says Gell-Mann. “But Hamilton did wonderful work rewriting mechanics and optics in ways that made them look quite analogous. He foreshadowed quantum mechanics.” The lecture is part of Hamilton Day, which will be celebrated on 16 October, the date on which, in 1843, William Rowan Hamilton scratched his formulas for quaternion algebra onto a stone on Broome Bridge outside Dublin. “Hamilton is Ireland’s most eminent scientist,” says the academy’s Pauric Dempsey. “But Irish scientists don’t have the same profile that writers have. On the street, people talk about Joyce and Yeats and Beckett. We want to build up Hamilton Day to raise the profile of math and science in Ireland.”