I was able to create a chart of my theoretical schemes, and I noticed that there were holes in the chart. And I predicted the existence of the particles to fill the chart. And those all worked. But then the question was: Was there some sub-unit out of which all of these particles were made? These strongly interacting particles. Well I tried it, and it came out that you could do it with a certain set of particles, and in a quite economical way. But they would have to have electrical charges, +2/3 and -1/3. And of course, all known particles had integral charges, in units of the proton or electron charge. The proton is called +1, the electron is called -1. And all the known particles had charges of +1 or -1, or possibly +2 or -2, and so on. Nothing had a fractional charge. But these sub-units — that would give the most economical scheme for making what we saw out of hidden sub-units — these sub-units would have charges of +2/3 or -1/3. I was initially discouraged, but then I made a visit to Columbia University, and a colleague there, Bob Serber, asked me whether I had ever considered this economical way of making sub-units, considering what you then called a triplet. And I said, “Yes, I have considered it, but they come out to have fractional charges.” And I showed him the fractional charges on a napkin in the faculty club in Columbia, where we were having lunch. And then, thinking about it during the rest of the day, it occurred to me that if they were completely hidden, these particles, if they never came out, but they were permanently trapped inside the known particles, then it wouldn’t cause any difficultly, any disagreement with observation or with any fundamental theoretical idea. And so I began to put it forward.

My attitude has been misunderstood all these years. There are zillions of books which describe the history of this, and describe it quite incorrectly. And in fact the Nobel Foundation, in awarding very — the Physics Prize this year — to three experimental colleagues who richly deserved it. My very good friend Dick Taylor, and my friends Henry Kendall and Jerry Friedman. In awarding it they mentioned that before the experiment, people thought of quarks as merely mathematical. Now that’s true, but what I meant by mathematical was that they were perfectly real, but trapped inside the neutron, proton, and the other observable strongly interacting particles. Which was correct. Completely correct. And other people, after the quark idea was put forward, came up with the notion that maybe they were directly observable. And that was wrong. But for some reason, history has twisted it around, so as to make my statements about the mathematical character of quarks — which I believed from the first day, that they wouldn’t come out — they have twisted it into a statement that I thought they weren’t really there, which is not the case at all. It’s a very strange perversion of fact, that makes its way into history sometimes, and this is one of those cases. It is true everywhere. I have tried very often with authors of lots of accounts, books, papers, articles and so on, to explain to them the situation, but it never does any good. So my being right has been converted into some kind of crime by history. Isn’t that strange?

Murray Gell-Mann: I find that particular aspect frustrating. It’s nice to be credited with quarks, and have the Swedish foundation refer to my work in awarding the prize to these three wonderful experimentalists who confirmed the existence of quarks inside the proton. I was delighted with all of that. But I was not delighted with this funny interpretation. Actually, the Nobel Foundation didn’t say it, didn’t actually state the thing wrong. But the implication was that by calling them mathematical, I was sort of denying their existence. What I meant by mathematical was that they wouldn’t come out and be seen individually and directly in the laboratory. And that’s turned out to be so; they are permanently trapped inside. We didn’t understand, of course, back in 1963. I didn’t understand why they were permanently trapped. But it was later on, when we formulated the dynamical theory, quantum chromodynamics, that we began to realize what was going on.

I had the sound, “quark.” But it could have been spelled differently. For example, k-w-o-r-k or something like that. I thought it was a nice sound. And it didn’t mean anything, I thought, and that was good because when we give fancy Greek names to things — and of course, I can do that — but when we give fancy Greek names to things, it usually turns out that what they mean later is not so appropriate as what we thought at first. The proton, for example. “The first thing,” it means. Fundamental. And it turns out it’s not fundamental. So, the name proton is very learned, but it turned out not to be apt. Now “quark,” if it didn’t mean anything at all, was not going to be obsolete, ever. Anyhow, that was fine. That was the sound. But then, leafing through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as I sometimes do — it’s a copy my brother bought, actually, when it first came out in the United States in 1939 — and leafing through it, I saw the phrase, “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” And I thought that would be very good. So I spelled it q-u-a-r-k. Now, Joyce undoubtedly meant it to be pronounced “kwark,” to go with bark, and hark, and mark and so on. But I figured out a rationale for pronouncing it “quark,” which is that in “Three quarks for Muster Mark” — of course there is multiple determination of the word, as in many other cases of Finnegans Wake.  And what I figured was that one source out of the multiple — of the many determinants of the word — one source was perhaps the fact that the dreamer, whose dream the book is, is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who is a bar man, a publican, he owns a bar. And frequently, through the book, you hear people giving orders for drinks at the bar, drinks to take away, and so on. So one of the determinants of “three quarks for Muster Mark” could be “three quarts” for so-and-so. An order to the bar. And I still think that may be true, although there are many other, more important factors that have gone into the phrase. Anyway, that allowed me to interpret that maybe it was pronounced “kwork” instead of “kwark.” But the commentators on Finnegans Wake think that — and I think, correctly — that the main thing that it refers to is “three cries of the four gulls” that are following the ship on which Tristan and Iseult are traveling. They’re making fun of King Mark, because Tristan and Iseult are having a love affair. Those four gulls occur throughout the book, as four evangelists, four old men in the park, and so on and so forth. Four commentators of various kinds, and in this case they’re four gulls following this ship. “Quark” is listed in the dictionary as the cry of a gull. So it’s undoubtedly the primary determinant, but maybe “three quarts for so-and-so” has a slight connection with it as well. That would justify pronouncing it “kwork” instead of “kwark.”

Initially, a lot of things I did were not taken very seriously. Then finally people realized that they were right. Quark certainly wasn’t taken seriously by most people, for quite a while. They thought it was some crazy thing. And people, as I said, misunderstood what I meant by saying that I thought they were mathematical. They thought I was going back on the original ideas, that they weren’t true. Whereas what I meant was that they were stuck inside permanently, which we finally found to be true, and we finally understood more or less why it’s true. But then, later on people began accepting all sorts of very tentative ideas of mine, as important, and working on them, and that was sort of embarrassing. I would put forward some not very serious idea, just as a passing remark, and lots of people would start working on it. Sort of the opposite effect.

Murray Gell-Mann: Maybe there is a way to jump-start that process, yes. To accelerate the getting of correct creative ideas, useful creative ideas. But in any case, the process, the normal spontaneous process, is apparently common to a great many fields. Psychologists have noted that; artists and scientists and others have written it down. We discovered it independently at a seminar in Aspen in 1969, where we had painters and poets and theoretical physicists and theoretical biologists, all talking about our experiences of getting useful ideas. And they were all just about the same. And they all followed that same pattern. (Hermann von) Helmholtz wrote about it one hundred years ago, more than one hundred years ago, and he called the phases: saturation, where you fill yourself up with the problem, but can’t solve it; incubation, the problem is hidden away and something deep inside you is working on it, some mental process out of awareness in what the shrinks would call the pre-conscious mind, is working on it; and then illumination, when suddenly a good idea breaks through. And then (Henri) Poincaré described this process also, and he described the fourth, rather trivial stage, which is verification, checking to see that the idea actually works.

Murray Gell-Mann: Just a slip of the tongue. That’s how I figured out the explanation of strangeness. I had come up with an incorrect explanation, which had some features in common with the correct one, but was wrong. And I knew why it was wrong. And another fellow had gotten the same idea, and figured out that it was wrong, and had written a letter about it, which was published. I hadn’t published anything. But he had published the idea, plus the reason why it was wrong, but in a very confused manner, so that it was extremely difficult to follow. I hadn’t even read it, but I knew what it was, because I had the idea, and I knew why it was wrong. And when I visited the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, where I had been working a short time before, the theoretical physicist there asked me to explain how this worked, how the idea went and why it was wrong. And I said, “Yes, I can do that.” So I went to the blackboard and I started explaining the idea, and explaining why it was wrong. Partway through I made a slip of the tongue, and I realized that the slip of the tongue made it okay, the arguments against no longer were valid, and this was probably the right answer. That was how I found the strangeness theory.

Murray Gell-Mann: One thing that is clear is that in our human mental processes, there are a lot of things going on at once, many parallel threads going on at once. But that our attention is not focused on more than one during a very brief time, like one 40th of a second. That’s a sort of unit of time for psychological attention. Something like a 40th or 50th of a second. And during that 40th or 50th of a second, it doesn’t seem that we can concentrate attention on a great many things. More like one thing. But we can jump around a lot, so we get the impression, for example, that we are following several conversations at once. But probably what we are doing is just sampling them serially, and using the redundancy of the conversations to fill in. And if the conversation consists of reciting a series of random numbers, then we cannot fill it in because there is no longer any pattern that you can use to fill in what you missed. Now, what that means is that there is a lot of information processing going on in parallel. But the searchlight or spotlight of consciousness seems to be a serial sequential element in this mess of parallel things. This, then this, then this, then this, then this. The nature of that spotlight is still quite unclear. Now this is all in fields far from the ones I have been trained in. So I obviously am not going to make any contribution to it through studying that particular kind of science. But by looking generally at thresholds of complexity, and looking generally at complex adaptive systems, and the laws that govern them, we might come up with some principles that will help to illuminate the nature of consciousness. A direct attack on it would have to be made by people who are professionally trained to study psychological phenomenon.