George Zweig

And what are they for? No one really knows.

In the 1960s, Murray Gellman and George Zweig come up with a proposal.

This huge number of particles is actually made of a small number of smaller particles called quarks.

Zweig calls them aces, but quarks is what sticks.

Closing it out here, here's your last one in Star Trek.

What five-letter word appears in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Armin Shimmerman's character in the Star Trek universe, and in the name of an elementary particle theorized by Murray Gilman and George Zweig in 1964? That is quark.

That is quark.

And you close out Star Trek, and you have these tangents left over.

Since we know that quarks make up hadrons and are the important interactions within QCD, let's talk a little bit more about quarks specifically.

Quarks were originally proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in the 1960s to help address the growing problem of the particle zoo that was being slowly discovered.

Scientists kept finding more and more new particles with all different masses and properties, and many believed that the chances of all these particles being fundamental decreased as more were discovered.

The quark model offered a solution, proposing that there were three quarks that combined in different ways to create hadrons.