An article in The Providence Journal follows the trail of two words -- ecstasy and quark -- from obscure origins to everyday English.

By naming newly described subatomic particles “quarks,” SFI's Murray Gell-Mann transformed a nonsense reference in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake into a foundational term of modern physics. 

The article, by Stanley Aronson, illustrates how such word transformations and borrowings across languages are borne of necessity.

Read the article in The Providence Journal (June 23, 2014)