Scientific Whimsy
So science is staid, boring, self-absorbed and totally devoid of any playfulness or whimsy? Actually, no. I thought I
would take a short diversion from the usual stuff about mis-folded proteins and so forth to tell you about some of the
quainter flights of fancy that scientists have come up with over the years.
Let’s start with Quarks. Quarks are elementary particles that are the foundation, the very building blocks of all the
matter however cold, dark or bright and sun-filled in our universe. And for those of us with more speculative minds, very
possibly all other universes beyond, although that thought is the ultimate hubris to imagine that ours is the only model
floating around out there. Quarks combine to form hadrons, the protons and neutrons with which you may be familiar, that
make up the greatest part of our atoms. There are six types of quarks, known, completely irrationally, as flavors – up, down,
charm, strange, top and (no prizes for this one) bottom. Now I like some odd flavors but “strange” would give me pause for
thought. At this point the composition of protons and so forth may start to seriously mess with your mind. For example, a
proton consists of 2 up quarks and 1 down quark. All quarks have been assigned a baryon number (don’t ask) of one third.
Up, bottom and top are+2/3, while down, strange and bottom are -1/3. There are also anti-quarks to contend with, not to
mention a host of either unproven or speculative particles like exotic mesons, which I thought were the group who
bulldozed Earth in “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” although on second thought I think those were Bosons. Getting glassy
eyed? I did once operate on the physicist who discovered the charm quark, but it didn’t really help understand the details.
Why quark? The discovery of quarks is credited to Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in about 1964. Gell-Mann
originally likened the term to the noise a gull makes but the term is more generally thought to have come from a passage
that he read in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” :–
“Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
I have tried to read Finnegan’s Wake many times, sometimes even getting to the second page. Gell-Mann originally thought
the pronunciation of quark should rhyme with “kwork,” but he found the phrase in Joyce’s book fitted his concept better.
Joyce sometimes used portmanteau words (a term coined by Lewis Caroll which combines two words like slimy and lithe to
form slithy (see below) into one word) and once he found Joyce’s phrase, Gell-Mann believed that the word should sound
like “bark” (the next line is “Sure he has not got much of a bark”) rather than the way he originally imagined it. “Finnegans
Wake” is about a publican’s (someone who runs a public house or Pub, not a member of a political party) dream and
phrases often sound like calls for drinks from the bar, so “quark” could sound like “quart,” or could be the cry of a gull, two
words in one. He also felt the reference to “three” fitted well with his theory since that’s the way quarks occur in nature.
If quarks are weird, how about Sonic Hedgehog genes. Sonic hedgehog homolog genes are fundamental in
mammalian cells for signaling and controlling development of key organ systems and limbs. But despite their crucial
importance, the name was coined from a video game character, Sonic the Hedgehog by Sega, but this odyssey of scientific
whimsy really took off after that name became established in the scientific terminology books. In the zebrafish, a sonic
hedgehog analog was called tiggywinkle hedgehog after Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, a hedgehog character in the children’s novels of
Beatrice Potter (who had a pet hedgehog), and the Indian (formerly Echidna) hedgehog gene was named for Spiny
Anteater, perhaps a reference to Knuckles the Echidna, another character from the Sonic Hedgehog game. Another gene
(Zbtb7) was originally called “Pokemon” but the name was abandoned over concerns for an infant who might have
“Pokemon” deficit. By the way, real hedgehogs live in England, Europe and Australia and are distantly related to porcupines.
They are nice, gentle creatures who roll up into a ball for protection and are much beloved by British kids. There has been a
lot of activity to protect them from automobile predation in recent years by building small tunnels under major highways.
Alice is a perfectly nice name, but perhaps a bit bizarre when applied to the largest hadron (those things comprised
of quarks) collider (A Large Ion Collision Experiment) in the world which seeks to learn about the origin of the universe by
hurling vast amounts of energy about. Alice is also of course the main character in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice through the Looking
Glass”, the ultimate source of portmanteau words:
‘Twas Brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All you need now to understand this is a smattering of Klingon and a sharp Vorpal blade (bat’leth in Klingon). Oh frabjous
(fair, fabulous and joyous) day! And you wonder why I thought this should be called the RX Files?
Nick Coe.