What exactly are quarks?

Quarks function as the building blocks of atomic nuclei, and heavier quarks quickly become up or down quarks through a process called particle decay. Particle decay can turn a high-mass state into a low-mass state, so quarks are very stable.

Quarks have many different intrinsic properties, including charge, color charge, spin, and mass. In the Standard Model, quarks are the only elementary particles that can sustain all four fundamental interactions, sometimes called the "fundamental forces." The word "quark" is a phrase Gell-Mann took from "three quarks for a collective mark" in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake. This means there are three quarks in a proton.

In addition, quark has many meanings in this book, and one of the protons composed of two up quarks and one down quark is the sound of a seabird. He believes that this fits his original strange idea that "elementary particles are not fundamental and basic charges are not integers." At the same time, he also pointed out that this was just a joke and a rebellion against pretentious scientific language. Also, probably because of his love of birds.