“Quark,” however, has a literary and far more imaginative origin. The physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who in 1964 proposed the existence of quarks as the internal constituents of neutrons and protons, and who at the time thought the quark family had only three members, drew the name from a characteristically elusive line in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
At the rate we are discovering meteorites on Earth whose origin is Mars, we conclude that about a thousand tons of Martian rocks rain down on Earth each year. Perhaps the same amount reaches Earth from the Moon.