Physicist and science historian David Kaiser's blog reviews the top science hits of 1964, including the introduction of the notion of the subatomic quark.
Writes Kaiser: "Two physicists, working independently, introduced the idea early in 1964; they were trying to make sense of curious patterns in the masses and interactions of dozens of newly discovered particles. Murray Gell-Mann [now an SFI co-founder, Life Trustee, and Distinguished Fellow] submitted a brief paper on January 4, 1964, in which he duly credited James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake for the whimsical term 'quark.' (Joyce's novel appears as Ref. 6 in Gell-Mann's brief references list.) Gell-Mann's two-page article was published in the February 1 edition of the journal Physics Letters. At nearly the same time, George Zweig at CERN wrote a lengthy paper introducing the same basic idea; he called the proposed new entities 'aces' instead of quarks, first in a preprint dated January 17, 1964, and expanded in a longer version dated February 21, 1964."
Read the article in the Huffington Post (February 10, 2014)