204 Quarks
however, was bored and restless in school and suffered from acute writer’s block. He rarely
finished papers and project descriptions, even though they were easy for him to complete.
Still, he sailed through undergraduate school at Yale and then drifted through MIT, the
University of Chicago (where he worked for Fermi) and Princeton (where he worked for
Oppenheimer). By the age of 24, he had decided to focus on understanding the bizarre particles that showed up on bubble chamber plots. Bubble chamber plots allowed scientists to
estimate the size, electrical charge, direction, and speed of each particle, but not its specific
identity. By 1958 almost 100 names were in use to identify and describe this forest of new
particles that had been detected.
Gell-Mann decided that he could make sense of these particles if he applied a few fundamental concepts of nature. He assumed that nature was simple and symmetrical. He also
assumed that, like all other matter and forces in nature, these