[kayo_20211030]

I found the reference. It was an interview with Freeman Dyson where he said "quarks were invented", and I don't think it's a slip of the tongue.

It's at 3:17 in this video of an interview with him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV41QEKiMlM

It's representative of a view that there's a thing (a particle) that explains another thing (a force) that was consistent with both theory and experiment. Thus, a quark could be a particle, and it was whatever the experimentalists and theorists said it was, however it was measured or contemplated.

For a deeper meaning it becomes an exercise in hermeneutics i.e what does it mean when we say "particle"? That was the point of the original piece - there is no uncontested view of a particle's form, should one even exist. Each field, in order to advance, finds it useful to interpret it, or think about it, in different ways.