George Zweig

Gell-Mann, despite being the first to publish his idea, had no idea he wasn't the only one proposing such particles.

Within a few weeks of Gell-Mann's paper, a young physicist at CERN named George Zweig arrived at essentially the same three-particle picture completely independently, but came at it from a completely different angle.

Zweig, notably, was much more serious.

He called his constituents aces, and unlike Gell-Mann, he argued they were real physical particles that ought to be found in the lab if anyone looked in the right places.

He wrote his proposal up as a CERN preprint and, by his own later account, had a difficult time getting it taken seriously.

When it was finished, it would simply be called SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

One of the young physicists swept up into that decade of construction was Richard Taylor.

In the spring of 1964, the same season Gell-Mann and Zweig were publishing their competing papers, Taylor found himself, in his own words, gradually being elected to take responsibility for designing the experimental hall that would eventually try to answer the question those two papers had raised.

This again is a topic which has been heavily over-dramatized on YouTube and beyond, but together, let's take a sober look at this.

In the 1960s, Murray Gellman and George Zweig independently proposed the quark model to explain the zoo of hadrons being discovered in particle accelerators, which gained growing evidence in the years that followed.

So we now understand that hadrons, such as neutrons, are comprised of quarks.

Specifically for the neutron star, there's two down quarks and one up.