quark

James Joyce, 1915 (left) and Murray Gell-Mann, 2012 (right)

23 August 2023

A quark is a subatomic particle that combine in pairs to form hadrons, the basic constituents of matter. The name is an arbitrary coinage inspired by a passage in James Joyce’s 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.

The word was coined by physicist Murray Gell-Man in a 1964 paper:

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 ½, z = ˗⅓, and baryon number ⅓. We then refer to the members u⅔, d ˗⅓, and s ˗⅓ of the triplet as “quarks”⁶ q and the members of the anti-triplet as anti-quarks ˗q. Baryons can now be constructed from quarks by using the combinations (q q q), (q q q ˗q), etc., while mesons are made out of (q ˗q), (q q ˗q ˗q), etc.

The note (#6) is to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in particular to a line in a poem that appears at the opening of the novel’s book 2, episode 4:

—THREE QUARKS for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn’t un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!
You’re the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah’s ark
And you think you’re cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy’s the spry young spark
That’ll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without ever winking the tail of a feather
And that’s how that chap’s going to make his money and mark!
 
Overhoved, shrillgleescreaming. That song sang seaswans. The winging ones. Seahawk, seagull, curlew and plover, kestrel and capercallzie. All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold when they smacked the big kuss of Trustan with Usolde.

The poem is, among other things, a reference to Arthurian legend. The Mark in question is King Mark of Cornwall, the “Cuckold King,” uncle to Tristan, who had an affair with Mark’s wife, Iseult. Joyce’s quark is probably an imitation of sea-bird’s call. Quark can also be a type of cheese similar to cottage cheese, but this makes little sense in Joyce’s context.

On its face, the passage has no relation to particle physics, but Gell-Mann explained his reasoning in a 27 June 1978 letter to the editors of the OED:

I employed the sound “quork” for several weeks in 1963 before noticing “quark” in “Finnegans Wake,” which I had perused from time to time since it appeared in 1939 [...] The allusion to three quarks seemed perfect [...] I needed an excuse for retaining the pronunciation quork despite the occurrence of “Mark,” “bark,” “mark,” and so forth in Finnegans Wake. I found that excuse by supposing that one ingredient of the line “Three quarks for Muster Mark” was a cry of “Three quarts for Mister…” heard in H. C. Earwicker's pub.

Quarks come in six types, arranged in three pair (up/down, charm/strange, top/bottom), and that struck Gell-Mann as sufficient justification for using the word as the name of the subatomic particle. The word stuck, but Gell-Mann’s preferred pronunciation did not.

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Sources:

Gell-Mann, M. “A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons.” Physics Letters, 8.3, 1 February 1964, 214/2. Elsevier Science Direct.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1939. 2.4, 383.

Merriam-Webster. “What Does ‘Quark’ Have to Do with Finnegans Wake?” Words at Play.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. quark, n.2., quawk, n.

Image credits: James Joyce: Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image; Murray Gell-Mann: Melirius, 2012, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

big endian / little endian / middle endian

A chicken egg

21 August 2023

Big-, little-, and middle endian are adjectives denoting ways to sequence data. A big-endian system places the most significant bit or digit at the beginning, a little-endian one places it at the end, and a middle-endian system puts it in the middle. Knowing the distinction has important implications for computer and information system design. The distinction is perhaps most easily explained using dates. A big-endian date places the year first, followed by the month then day: 20230821. A little-endian scheme reverses that order, putting the day first: 21082023 or 21 August 2023. And a middle-endian system mixes it up: 08212023 or August 21, 2023.

Big endian and little endian were coined by computer scientist Danny Cohen in a 1 April 1980 paper:

This is an attempt to stop a war. I hope it is not too late and that somehow, magically perhaps, peace will prevail again.

The latecomers into the arena believe that the issue is: “What is the proper byte order in messages?”. [sic]

The root of the conflict lies much deeper than that. It is the question of which bit should travel first, the bit from the little end of the word, or the bit from the big end of the word? The followers of the former approach are called the Little-Endians, and the followers of the latter are called the Big-Endians. The details of the holy war between the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians are documented in [Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travel (sic). Unknown publisher, 1726.] and described, in brief, in the Appendix. I recommend that you read it at this point.

As Cohen notes, his names were inspired by Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels. In the novel, Swift describes a religious war between the people of the islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu over which end of an egg to break before eating it, the big end or the little end:

During the Course of these Troubles, the Emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their Embassadors, accusing us of making a Schism in Religion, by offending against a fundamental Doctrine of our great Prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth Chapter of the Blundecral, (which is their Alcoran.) This, however, is thought to be a meer Strain upon the Text: For the Words are these; That all true Believers shall break their Eggs at the convenient End: and which is the convenient End, seems, in my humble Opinion, to be left to every Man’s Conscience, or at least in the power of the Chief Magistrate to determine. Now, the Big-Endian Exiles have found so much Credit in the Emperor of Blefuscu’s Court, and so much private assistance and Encouragement from their Party here at home, that a bloody War hath been carried on between the two Empires for six and thirty Moons with various Success.

Note that Swift only used the term Big-Endian in his novel.

Nor did Cohen use the term middle endian. That term was coined later. The earliest use I have found is in a Usenet post from 27 December 1998, but I’m sure antedatings can be found:

It seemed resonable [sic] to me to to have MSB at the left and LSB at the right. Obviously this wasn't so for others so, which was natural for you and what influences were operating on h/w designers to influence the final result as big/middle/little endian?

MSB/LSB = most/least significant bit.

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Sources:

Cohen, Danny. “On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace.” Internet Engineering Notes 137, 1 April 1980.

Lamb, C. “Big, Little and Middle Endian-ness.” Usenet: alt.folklore.computers, 27 December 1998.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. big-endian, n. and adj.; September 2014, s.v. little-endian, n. and adj.; December 2012, s.v. small-endian, n. and adj.

Swift, Jonathan [Lemuel Gulliver, pseud.]. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, vol. 1 of 4. London: Benjamin Motte, 1726, 74–75. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Sun Ladder, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

flerovium

Russian postal stamp celebrating the 100th anniversary of Georgy Flerov’s birth and the naming of element 114 after the laboratory named for him

18 August 2023

Flerovium is an artificially created element with atomic number 114 and symbol Fl. Flerovium isotopes have half-lives less than two seconds, although more stable forms have been theorized. Only some ninety flerovium atoms have been produced and detected, so the element obviously has no practical uses beyond research. It was first synthesized in 1998 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, in collaboration with scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States.

The element is named after the Flerov* Laboratory of JINR. The laboratory itself is named for physicist Georgy Flerov (1913–90). Flerovium had been previously proposed as a name for a number of other elements, including element 102 (nobelium) before IUPAC approved it for element 114.

The proposed name, along with that of element 116 (livermorium), was announced at the closing ceremony of the International Year of Chemistry held in Brussels on 1 December 2011. The JINR’s press release about the naming of 2 December 2011 reads, in part:

With Professor Yuri Oganessian as spokesperson the collaborators have proposed the name flerovium (symbol Fl) for element number 114 and the name livermorium (symbol Lv) for that with number 116. […]

Both of the names proposed lie within the long tradition of the choice of names for elements. The proposal for 114 will honour the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions where the superheavy elements are synthesised. Georgiy N. Flerov (1913 – 1990) is recognised as a renowned physicist, author of the discovery of the spontaneous fission of uranium (1940, with Konstantin A. Petrzhak), pioneer in heavy-ion physics; and founder in the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (1957).

The names of both elements were officially approved by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) the following year.

*The name Флёров is perhaps more accurately transliterated as Flyorov, but I’ve maintained the Flerov spelling here because it is the more usual transliteration and for consistency with the spelling of the element’s name.

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Sources:

Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR). “Names Proposed for Elements of Atomic Number 114 and 116” (press release), 2 December 2011.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, s.v. flerovium, n.

Image credit: MARKA Publishing & Trading Centre, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image

comet

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), 1 February 2023

16 August 2023

A comet is a solar-system object consisting of a nucleus of ice and dust, which sublimates into a “tail” when its orbit takes it close to the sun. Short-period comets, those with orbital periods less than two hundred years, originate in the Kuiper belt, while long-period comets are thought to originate in the Oort cloud.

The word comet has a straightforward etymology. It was borrowed into Old English from the Latin cometa, which in turn comes from the Greek κομήτης (komete, long-haired), short for ἀστὴῤ κομήτης (aster kometes, long-haired star). The word’s use in English was subsequently reinforced by the Anglo-Norman comete.

The following is the account of the return of Halley’s Comet in the year 1066 that appears in the Worcester Chronicle:

Portion of the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the sighting of Halley’s Comet in 1066

MLXVI. On þissum geare com Harold cyng of Eoferwic to Westmynstre · to þam Eastran · þe wæron þa Eastran on þone dæg XVI. K[alends] Mai. Þa wearð geond eall England swylc taken on heofenum gesewen swylce nan man ær ne geseah. Sume men cwedon þ[æt] hit cometa se steorra wære · þone sume men hatað þone fæxedon steorran · & he ateowde ærest on þone æfen Letania Maior · VIII. K[alends] Mai · & swa scan ealle þa seofan niht.

(1066. In this year King Harold came from York to Westminster at Easter, which was the Easter then on the sixteenth Kalends of May [16 April]. Then was seen over all England such a sign in the heavens as no man had ever seen before. Some men said that the star was a comet, that some men call the hairy star, and it first appeared on the eve of Litania major, the eighth Kalends of May [24 April]. And it shone all the seven nights.)

Since antiquity, the appearance of a comet has been thought to be an omen of a momentous event or disaster. And in 1066 for once, that turned out to be the case.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. comete, n.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. cometa, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. comete, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, s.v. comet, n.

Thorpe, Benjamin, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, vol. 1 of 2. London: Longman, Green Longman, and Roberts, 1861, 336. HathiTrust Digital Library. London. British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.iv.

Image credits: Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF): David Wilton, 2023. This photo is licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Bayeux Tapestry: Myrabella, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

bordello

Salon at the Rue des Moulins (1894), by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

14 August 2023

A bordello is, of course, a brothel, a house of prostitution. It is an example of a word that has been borrowed into English multiple times at different points in history.

Bordello is a sixteenth-century borrowing from Italian, but it has an earlier form bordel, dating to c. 1300, that is a borrowing from Anglo-Norman. The Anglo-Norman originally, c. 1185, meant a cottage or hut but came to mean a brothel by around 1300, about the time the word started to be used in English. The French and Italian words come from the post-classical Latin bordellum, meaning a cottage or small land holding. Bordellum appears in Anglo-Latin from c. 1100. (The Anglo-Latin word would later, in the late fourteenth century, also acquire the sense of a brothel, but this sense would be due to influence from the English and Anglo-Norman.)

Bordel appears in English writing c. 1300 in the Life of St. Lucy found in the collection of hagiographies known as the Early South English Legendary. Lucy was condemned to a brothel for refusing to marry a pagan man and for giving to the poor her wealth, which legally belonged to the man she was supposed to marry. One version of the life has this exchange between the judge and Lucy:

“I-wedded ich was to Ihesu crist,” : þis holie maide him tolde
“Þo ich was i-baptized : and þulke weddinge ichulle holde.
Ake to hore-dome þov wouldest me bringue : ȝwane þov me wouldest make
Mine spousede louerd Ihesu crist : for ani oþur man for-sake.”
“Þou schalt for-sake him,” quath þe Iustise : “haddest þou it i-swore :
For to þe commune bordel þov schalt beo :  i-lad oþur i-bore,
And þare schal mani a moder-child : go to þi foule licame
And ligge bi þe, alle þat wollez : in hore-dom and in schame.”

(“I was wed to Jesus Christ,” this holy maid told him. “At the time I was baptized, and it was ordained that I should have that marriage. Yet to whoredom you would bring me when you would make me forsake my spouse, the lord Jesus Christ, for any other man.”

“You shall forsake him,” said the judge, “whom you had promised. For to a common bordel you shall be taken or carried, and there shall many a mother’s child go to your foul body and lie with you, all that will, in whoredom and in shame.”)

Bordello, borrowed from the Italian, first appears in a 1581 anti-Catholic tract:

Wisdome is requisite in a Pope, whereby he may knowe golde from siluer, gemmes and precious stones, fro[m] common stones which bee in the streetes. Hee must haue wisedome to counte them, wisedome to locke them vp in his treasure house: hee cannot bee without wisedome to picke out the best golde from the badde, to giue to his waiting gentlewomen at bed and boorde. Hee must moreouer haue wisedome to prouide for his bastardely children, which hee begot whiles hee was a soule Priest to the Putanne in the Burdello or whilest hee saide Masse elswhere for money, to supplie the necessitie of any sober Curtezane, and defloured Virgin

Note that bordello, or burdello, appears in an Italian context and is italicized in the book, indicating that the word was not fully anglicized by this date. But it would quickly be picked up and replace bordel as the more common form.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. bordel, n.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. bordellum, bordellus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. “Vita sancta Lucie uirginis.” The Early South English Legendary. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1887, 103, lines 91–98. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 108. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. bordel, n.(1).

Nicholls, John. Pilgrimage, Whrein Is Diplaied the Liues of the Proude Popes, Ambitious Cardinals, Lecherous Bishops, Fat Bellied Monkes, and Hypocriticall Iesuites. London: Thomas Dawson, 1581, sig. C3. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2022, s.v. bordello, n.

Image credit: Painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1894. Public domain work. Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by Didier Descouens, 2021, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.