In the 1960s, in an attempt to bring just a little simplicity to matters, the Caltech physicist Murray Gell-Mann invented a new class of particles, essentially, in the words of Steven Weinberg, ‘to restore some economy to the multitude of hadrons15’ – a collective term used by physicists for protons, neutrons and other particles governed by the strong nuclear force. Gell-Mann’s theory was that all hadrons were made up of still smaller, even more fundamental particles. His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they
...more
Murray Gell-Mann - Theory of Quarks
