What is the correct pronunciation of the word Quark?

muzzyhill3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark The Quark model was proposed by two physicists, George Zwieg and Murray Gell-Mann. According to Gell-Mann it was always meant to be pronounced "Kwork" depite the fact he got the name from Joyce's Finnegans Wake - "two quarks for Master Mark" where it appears to heve been intended to be pronounced phonetically. Jan 27 13, 2:35 PM

GoodwinPD

Thanks for that - your reference has also helped me find the following: "Gell-Mann went into further detail regarding the name of the quark in his book, The Quark and the Jaguar: "In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark", as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking-Glass". From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark", in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature." Zweig preferred the name ace for the particle he had theorized, but Gell-Mann's terminology came to prominence once the quark model had been commonly accepted." Jan 27 13, 3:31 PM