Hugh David Politzer

The resolution to half of the confinement problem came in 1973 from two independent groups working on it from different directions.

David Gross and his student Frank Wilczek at Princeton, and David Politzer, a graduate student at Harvard.

All three were digging into the math of a particular kind of theory, a force carried by particles that interact not just with matter, but also with each other.

What they found was almost the opposite of what most physicists in the field expected, and by Gross's own later account, the community had been leaning so hard toward the opposite conclusion that he originally set out hoping to rule this kind of theory out entirely.

Sixteen years after the J psi discovery in nineteen ninety, the Nobel Committee handed out more prizes.

This time, it was split three ways between Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall, and Richard Taylor for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.

Fourteen years after that in two thousand four, David Gross, David Politzer, and Frank Wilczek were awarded the prize for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.

Gross, looking back on the discovery years later, was candid about how close the field had come to missing it entirely.