Today is the birthday of Murray Gell-Mann, who is credited with (co)discovering the quark in the same year as George Zweig. Gell-Mann, however, deserves all the credit for naming the quark in 1964-he created the name out of a non-sense word from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. Born September 15, 1929, Gell-Man was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery. In addition to the quark, Dr. Gell-Mann had an amazing career-a true pioneer of particle physics. Happy Birthday!
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Image of Murray Gell-Mann by Jurvetson (flikr), used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
Image of the up and down quarks that compose a simple proton by Arpad Horvath, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
