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James Joyce
(2 Feb 1882 - 13 Jan 1941)
Irish novelist, poet and critic whose works include Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. His last novel, Finnegan’s Wake (1922), his innovative language experiment that contains over forty languages and a huge variety of popular and arcane references.
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Science Quotes by James Joyce (3 quotes)
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
— James Joyce
In Ulysses (1920), 190.
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
— James Joyce
Part of a 13-line poem in Finnegan’s Wake (1939), Book 2, Chap. 4, 383. [Other rhyming lines ended with lark, park, ark, wark, and spark. The first line inspired Murray Gell-Mann to give the name “quarks” (which he pronounced “kworks”) for fundamental particles (of which at the time he thought there were three), believed in combination to form other known subatomic particles. —Webmaster]
Well, we have frankly enjoyed more than anything these secret workings of natures.
— James Joyce
In Finnegan’s Wake (1939), 615.
Quotes by others about James Joyce (2)
The mathematics clearly called for a set of underlying elementary objects—at that time we needed three types of them—elementary objects that could be combined three at a time in different ways to make all the heavy particles we knew. ... I needed a name for them and called them quarks, after the taunting cry of the gulls, “Three quarks for Muster mark,” from Finnegan's Wake by the Irish writer James Joyce.
From asppearance in the BBC-TV program written by Nigel Calder, 'The Key to the Universe,' (27 Jan 1977). As cited in Arthur Lewis Caso, 'The Production of New Scientific Terms', American Speech (Summer 1980), 55, No. 2, 101-102.
I would not want to generalize to the extent that adversity is the only road to effective innovative science, or art, but the progress of science is often spectacularly disorderly. James Joyce once commented that he survived by “cunning and exile”.
In 'Homo Scientificus According to Beckett', collected in William Beranek, Jr. (ed.),Science, Scientists, and Society, (1972), 135-. Excerpted in Ann E. Kammer, Science, Sex, and Society (1979), 278.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
