76 D The Secret L$e of Nature
under scrutiny. And in any case, none matched the theosophists' UPAS,
of which they counted nine in a proton.
The first indication of a possible reconciliation between what the
theosophists described and what the physicists might concede only
came in the mid-1960s when a particle smaller than a proton was
mathematically postulated by theoretical physicists. In 1964 Murray
Gell-Mann at the California Institute of Technology and George
Zweig at CERN independently proposed the existence of what they
referred to as "mathematical structures": three smaller constituents of a
proton. Although such postulated particles-quirluly called quarks by
Gell-Mann-were mathematically "logical constructs" based on the
patterns of hadrons or organized protons and neutrons that appeared in
the black boxes, they showed too many unlikely features to be taken
seriously by the rest of the scientific community.
Believing in quarks, said eminent professor of physics Harold
Fritsch, required the acceptance of too many peculiarities, not the least
of which were their unconventional charges: the new mathematical
theory required quarks to have not integral but an unheard-of fractional
charge of z/3 or -I /3. So far all particles had been measured in whole-
number multiples of the charge of an electron.
In view of this attitude, what was later to become accepted by sci-
ence as one of the great theoretical breakthroughs of the century had
to be ushered in as a joke during an amateur cabaret show in Aspen,
Colorado. As reported by Barry Taubes in the publication Discover,
Murray Gell-Mann jumped up from the audience on cue and babbled
wildly what seemed like nonsense about how he had just figured
out the whole theory of the universe, of quarks, of gravity, and of
everything else. "As he raved with increasing frenzy, two men in
white coats came on stage to drag him away, leaving the audience
in laughter."
Even the manner in which the new particles were named was
enough to incite ridicule.The word quark in German describes a spe-
cial lund of soft cheese and is synonymous with nonsense. Gell-Mann
claimed it was the number three that led him to introduce the word,
inspired by a passage from Jaws Joyce's Finnegans Wake: