Abstract

To be, or not to be, that is the question…In his wonderful Facts and Mysteries, Martinus Veltman terminates a section with an anecdote: “When quarks were not immediately discovered after the introduction by Gell-Mann he took to calling them symbolic, saying they were indices. In the early seventies I met him at CERN and he again said something in that spirit. I then jumped up, coming down with some impact that made the floor tremble, and asked him: Do I look like a heap of indices? This visibly rattled him, and indeed after that he no more advocated this vision, at least not as far as I know” (see page 240 in Veltman 2003). Although it is probable that Murray Gell-Mann, the inventor of quarks, has changed his mind regarding the reality of his symbols after this tough conversation, even later in the start of eighties the reality of quarks, as basic constituents of protons and neutrons, was a matter of disputes and exchanges (Shrader-Frechette 1982a, b; Albright 1982; Gruender 1982). A g