The strong nuclear force and the gluons as gauge particles

Together with the “electroweak” force, comprising the weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism, there have been parallel developments in identifying the gauge aspects of the strong nuclear force, also mediated by messengers of spin-one – the so-called gluons (so that one has come to believe more and more in the validity of the gauge ideas). These developments started in the early 1970s and culminated in the “indirect” findings of gluons at the DESY Laboratory at Hamburg in 1979.

The story starts with three doublets of quark flavours (u, d), (c, s) and (t, b). It turns out that there are not just six but eighteen distinct quarks, distinguished from each other by COLOUR. Each quark comes in three colours which have once again been given whimsical names like Red (R), Yellow (Y) and Blue (B). A postulated symmetry between these three colours would give rise to eight gauge particles – the so-called gluons.