Probing ever deeper into the inner world of the atom, nuclear physicists have uncovered an increasingly baffling collection of tiny particles. Besides the familiar neutrons, electrons and protons, they are now pondering dozens of new and strange bits of matter bearing such exotic names as lambdas, pions, kaons and sigmas. Five years ago, in an effort to bring order to this subatomic chaos, Physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, both now at Caltech, in dependently dreamed up strange elemental particles—out of which all the others could be constructed. Gell-Mann emphasized that the particles, which he whimsically dubbed quarks, were...
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