 In December 2009, Murdoch Ross and his friend Lee Francis Walker visit Murdoch's grandfather, Sir Charles Ross, in his castle in Storbannon, Scotland.Sir Charles is a Nobel Prize winner for his work in particle physics — more specifically the isolation of free quarks.In this novel, when a nucleon decays into three quarks, the first two quarks appear immediately and the third quark appears on the order of a few millionths of an "yoctosecond" later.