As they probe deeper into the heart of the atom, discovering ever smaller and more mysterious particles and particles within particles, scientists have succeeded in bringing the once stable world of nuclear physics to a state of near chaos. Groping among their new-found lambdas, pions, kaons, sigmas and other bits of matter with strange names and even stranger characteristics, physicists hope some day to restore order by finding a truly elemental particle one out of which all the others are made.
The need for this key building block of the universe became so great that in 1962 Physicists...