However, quarks did not seem to be
the perfect answer. Gell-Mann and Zweig recognized that their idea
had a severe problem: one has to assign fractional charges to the quarks
to come up with the known charges of the mesons and baryons. And no
such charges had ever been seen before.
Gell-Mann and Zweig faced two other serious problems before their theory
could be taken seriously. First, quarks had not been observed and no
one could explain why. Second, one could imagine putting quarks together
in other combinations, but these other combinations were never seen. |
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