Both protons and neutrons are made up of even smaller particles that the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann named “quarks,” inspired by a seemingly nonsensical word in a nonsensical phrase in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” Everything we touch is therefore made of electrons and of these quarks. The force that “glues” quarks inside protons and neutrons is generated by particles that physicists, with little sense of the ridiculous, call “gluons.”
