Page "Murray Gell-Mann" Paragraph 7

In 1964, Gell-Mann and George Zweig, independently, went on to postulate the existence of quarks, particles of which hadrons are composed.

The name was coined by Gell-Mann and is a reference to the novel Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce (" Three quarks for Muster Mark!

" book 2, episode 4 ).

Zweig had referred to the particles as " aces ", but Gell-Mann's name caught on.

Quarks, antiquarks, and gluons were soon accepted as the underlying elementary objects in the study of the structure of hadrons.

In 1972 he and Harald Fritzsch introduced the conserved quantum number " color charge ", and later along with Heinrich Leutwyler, they introduced quantum chromodynamics ( QCD ) as the gauge theory of the strong interaction ( cf.

references ).

The quark model is a part of QCD, and it has been robust enough to survive the discovery of new " flavors " of quarks.