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seemed plausible but absent. There were even more mysterious particles called V-particles. The problem with these enormously massive items was that particle accelerators produced them copiously, with relative ease, yet they did not decay with corresponding ease. They lingered for as long as a billionth of a second. Pais’s approach to associated production had reached toward the heart of some of the regularities in need of explanation. It contained the crucial idea of another hidden symmetry. It was also reaching a peak of popularity: in the summer of 1953 Pais created such a stir at an international conference in Japan that Time magazine called him at his hotel. His roommate answered the phone—it happened to be Feynman, attending the same conference to present his liquid helium results. Feynman felt a flicker of envy when he realized that Time had no interest in him. Gell-Mann, in Chicago, felt even more, particularly since he now saw a far more powerful answer.

Physicists had learned to speak comfortably about four fundamental forces: gravity; electromagnetism, which dominated all chemical and electrical processes; the strong force binding the atom’s nucleus; and the weak force, at work in the slow processes of radioactive decay. The quick appearance and slow disappearance of V-particles suggested that their creation relied on strong forces and that weak forces came into play as they decayed. Gell-Mann proposed a new fundamental quantity, which for a while he called y. This y was like a new form of charge. Charge is conserved in particle events—the total going in equals the total coming out. Gell-Mann supposed that y is conserved, too—but not always. The algebraic logic of Gell-Mann’s scheme decreed that strong interactions would conserve y, and so would electromagnetic interactions, but weak interactions would not. They would break the symmetry. Thus strong interactions would create a pair of particles whose y had to cancel each other (1 and – 1, for example). Such a particle, having flown away from its sibling, could not decay through a strong interaction because there was no longer a canceling y. That gave the slower weak interaction time to take over.

Artificial though it was, Gell-Mann’s y qualified as not just a description but an explanation. As he conceived his framework, it was an organizing principle. It gave him a way of seeing families of particles, and its logic was so compelling that the families had obvious missing members. He was able to predict—and did predict, in papers he began publishing in August 1953—specific new particles not yet discovered, as well as specific particles that he insisted could not be discovered. His timing was perfect. Experimenters bore out each of his positive predictions (and failed to contradict the negative ones). But this was only part of Gell-Mann’s triumph. He also injected a piece of his fascination with language into the temporarily befuddled business of physics nomenclature. He decided to call his quantity y “strangeness” and the families of V-like particles “strange.” A Japanese physicist, Kazuhiko Nishijima, who had independently hit upon the same scheme just months after Gell-Mann, chose the considerably less friendly name “?-charge.” Amid all the -ons and Greek-lettered particles, strange sounded whimsical and unorthodox. The editors of the Physical Review would not allow “Strange Particles” in Gell-Mann’s title, insisting instead on “New Unstable Particles.” Pais did not like it either. He pleaded with the audience at a Rochester conference to avoid loaded terms like “strange.” Why should a broad-minded theorist consider one particle stranger than another? The quirkiness of the word had a distancing effect: perhaps this new construct was not quite as real as charge. But Gell-Mann’s command of language had an unstoppable force. Strangeness was only the beginning.

The winter Fermi died, just before Christmas 1954, Gell-Mann wrote to the one physicist who seemed to him utterly genuine, free of phoniness, the one who did not worship formalism and superficialities, whose