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Murray Gell-Mann, The 1969
Nobel Prize in Physics
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Later,
another important property was discovered. In high energy collisions,
particles called K-mesons were produced in large quantities. But there
was something strange about them. They were observed to have such a
long lifetime that some law must be preventing them from decaying into
other particles.
Murray Gell-Mann (The Nobel Prize in Physics 1969)
proposed that K-Mesons and some other particles had a new property
called "strangeness." He then recognized these properties and patterns
as part of a mathematical classification scheme.
However, it did not seem to quite work. The scheme
predicted the existence of a particle that had yet to be found, W (omega-). But this did not hold back
physicists. They soon found the particle at the mass predicted by
Gell-Mann. This confirmed that the pattern was indeed true. |
