Penguins in modern physics?

Physics, literature and cows...

Penguins

In a preface written for Mikhail Shifman's 1999 book, ITEP Lectures on Particle Physics and Field Theory, John Ellis (CERN) recalls how the gluon interference diagram came to be called a penguin diagram.

One night in spring 1977, Ellis lost a bet during a game of darts.
His penalty required that he use the word "penguin" in a journal article.

For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this quark paper that we were writing at the time. Then, one evening I stopped on my way back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrin, where I smoked some illegal substance. Later, when I got back to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams looked like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Another example is loose in the computerworld: The penguin is also the token-animal of the operatingsystem Linux (a modern variant of Unix).

Quarks

Quarks could be another example of how names are wandering. When science inspires literature, science fiction results. But it works both ways: "Quark" is a subatomic particle, the name borrowed from James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake": "Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure he hasn't got much of a bark/And sure any he has it's all beside the mark."

In 1963 the physicist Murray Gell-Mann assigned the name "quark" to a new subatomic particle: »When I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking Glass". 

From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.« ("The Quark and the Jaguar", paperback in 1995.)

Here's the whole quark-section in Finnegans Wake:

-- Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn't un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!
You're the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah's ark
And you think you're cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy's the spry young spark
That'll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without ever winking the tail of a feather
And that's how that chap's going to make his money and mark!
Overhoved, shrillgleescreaming. That song sang seaswans.

Cows..?

To complicate things even further, quark is also an old central european name (of slavic origin) for a soft creamy milkproduct. Imagine a youghurt-variant...
Physics, literature and cows! Quite a diverse origin...

mdl, oct 2003