George Zweig

George Zweig was an American physicist who, in 1964, independently proposed the concept of quarks. He suggested that hadrons, which are subatomic particles, are composed of three fundamental building blocks. These particles, which he named quarks, were theorized to have unusual properties, including fractional electric charges of +2/3e or -1/3e.1

Initially, it was unclear if quarks were real or merely a mathematical construct. However, by the mid-1970s, evidence from experiments using particle accelerators indicated that quarks exist but are confined within hadrons, preventing their escape as individual entities. This theory, along with quantum field theory, forms the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics.12