Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Quark
5. His name was inspired by James Joyce
As you well know, a lot of Star Trek characters were named after real-life scientists, explorers, and engineers, but there were also quite a few of them named after literary characters. It was a common theme in Gene Roddenberry's character naming habits.
The name Quark is one of those inspired by literature, but not by a particular character. In James Joyce's seminal novel Finnegan's Wake, there is a quote that goes:
"Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark."
It was a fairly inconsequential line, but the Deep Space Nine creators liked the sound of the word "quark" so much that they chose it to be the character's name.
However, the science fiction ties don't stop there, since the same quote inspired the Nobel prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann to give the name quark to the elementary particles of nature, back in 1963. All matter in the universe might be comprised of quarks, so let's just be thankful that they're not of the Ferengi variety.