Particle zoo

Instead of a tidy universe built of electrons, protons, and neutrons, experimentalists were suddenly inundated with a chaotic flood of new, unexpected subatomic particles.

This bewildering array of discoveries became known as the Particle Zoo.

Physicists found themselves sorting through an alphabet soup of pions, kaons, muons, lambdas, and hyperons, many of which existed for only a fraction of a microsecond before decaying.

The situation was so overwhelmingly chaotic that the Nobel laureate physicist Willis Lamb famously joked that while the discoverer of a new elementary particle used to be rewarded with a Nobel Prize, such a discovery should now be punished with a $1,000 fine.