The things we see are made of atoms. Every atom consists of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. Every nucleus consists of tightly packed protons and neutrons. 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.
