Quark

A quark (/ˈkwɔːrk/ or /ˈkwɑːrk/) is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly observed or found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, such as baryons (of which protons and neutrons are examples), and mesons. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of the hadrons themselves.

Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, color charge and spin. Quarks are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction), as well as the only known particles whose electric charges are not integer multiples of the elementary charge.

Le Bal

Le Bal can refer to:

The Man

"The Man" is a slang phrase that may refer to the government or to some other authority in a position of power. In addition to this derogatory connotation, it may also serve as a term of respect and praise.

The phrase "the Man is keeping me down" is commonly used to describe oppression. The phrase "stick it to the Man" encourages resistance to authority, and essentially means "fight back" or "resist", either passively, openly or via sabotage.

History

As a phrase meaning "the boss" it dates from at least 1918.

In the Southern U.S. states, the phrase came to be applied to any man or any group in a position of authority, or to authority in the abstract. From about the 1950s the phrase was also an underworld code word for police, the warden of a prison or other law enforcement or penal authorities.

The use of this term was expanded to counterculture groups and their battles against authority, such as the Yippies, which, according to a May 19, 1969 article in U.S. News and World Report, had the "avowed aim ... to destroy 'The Man', their term for the present system of government". The term eventually found its way into humorous usage, such as in a December 1979 motorcycle ad from the magazine Easyriders which featured the tagline, "California residents: Add 6% sales tax for The Man."

The Man from Mars

The Man from Mars (Polish: Człowiek z Marsa) is a "first contact" science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem: American scientists are trying to deal with a creature in a crashed spaceship from Mars.

Publication history

It was Lem's first science fiction work, serialized in a Katowice weekly, Nowy Świat Przygód ("New Adventure World") in 1946, starting in the first issue. Lem considered it extremely naive and weak; he said he wrote it exclusively "for bread", and refused to reprint it for a long time. Some Polish sci-fi fanclubs produced small editions of pirated reprints. Later it was printed legally several times in Germany, where a publishing house had rights for Lem's juvenilia. The first legal Polish reprint, in book format, was in 1994 (ISBN 8370540686) Independent Publishing House NOWA.

In 2009 for the first time a long excerpt from Chapter 1 was translated into English by Peter Swirski and published with permission of Lem's family in an online literary magazine Words Without Borders.