Note: mini-AIR is "a free newsletter of tidbits too tiny to fit in the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), the journal of inflated research and personalities."
We have received word that defective quarks* (our informant calls them Joycean, not Gell-Mannian) are being distributed in Switzerland. Until and unless the report is verified, and until someone figures out what this means, we urge caution and discourage panic.
* smallest elementary subatomic particle, discovered by Murray Gell-Mann (Nobel prize 1969) and named after a word in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
...these are surely neither Joycean nor Gell-Mannian, but genuine Swiss quarks. Quark in German (and I must assume this is German speaking Switzerland) literally refers to milkcurds or Cottage Cheese. However, it is not credible that Swiss (of all people) could distribute defective Swiss or any other kind of cheese.
Figuratively, quark means nonsense, as in "Quatsch doch keinen Quark". How anyone can have defective nonsense, much less distribute it, much less in tidy, rational Switzerland is beyond the understanding of science, -- physical, social, improbable or otherwise.
Could it be said that the Annals of Improbable Research specializes in quark, is so to speak the Journal of Quark?
On the news there may be yet smaller particles than quarks:
If big quarks have little quarks
Within them causing scatter,
And little quarks have lesser quarks
And so on; then what is matter?with apologies to Jonathan Swift, Science News, 149 (4 May 1996) p. 275
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