SOME PEOPLE spend their days with pencils and paper clips, others with diapers and shopping carts. Physicists and astronomers, though, deal with WIMPs and MACHOs, giants and dwarfs, and bubble chambers. Then, there are the subatomic particles called quarks, which figure prominently in physics and astronomy. There are six types: up, down, beauty, truth, charm, and strange quarks. Strange quarks? They all sound pretty strange. The terms seem more at home in Alice's Wonderland than in the ...