Today it is known that the atomic nuclei are composed of smaller constituents, the quarks. A quark is always bound with two other quarks, forming a baryon or with an antiquark, forming a meson. The quark model was first postulated in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann -- who coined the name "quark" from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake -- and by George Zweig, who then worked at CERN. In the present theory of strong interactions -- Quantum Chromodynamics proposed by H Fritzsch and Gell-Mann in 1972 -- the forces that bind the quarks together are due to the exchange of eight gluons. On the 50th anniversary of the quark model, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in the elementary particle physics that eventuated from that beautiful model. Written by an international team of distinguished physicists, each of whom have made major developments in the field, the volume provides an essential overview of the present state to the academics and researchers.

Contents: A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons (M Gell-Mann); Quarks (M Gell-Mann); Concrete Quarks: The Beginning of the End (G Zweig); On the Way from Sakatons to Quarks (L B Okun); My Life with Quarks (S L Glashow); Quarks and the Bootstrap Era (D Horn); From Symmetries to Quarks and Beyond (S Meshkov); How I got to work with Feynman on the Covariant Quark Model (F Ravndal); What is a Quark? (G L Kane & M J Perry); Insights and Puzzles in Particle Physics (H Leutwyler); QCD and Quarks (H Fritzsch); The Discovery of Gluon (J Ellis); Discovery of the Gluon (S L Wu); The Parton Model and its Applications (T M Yan & S D Drell); From Old Symmetries to New Symmetries: Quarks, Leptons and B-L (R Mohapatra); Quark Mass Hierarchy and Flavor Mixing Puzzles (Z Z Xing); Analytical Determination of the QCD Quark Masses (C Dominguez); Quark Model and CP Violation (M Kobayashi); The Constituent-Quark Model -- Nowadays (W Plessas); From O- to Ob, Doubly Heavy Baryons and Exotics (M Karliner); Quark Elastic Scattering as a Source of High Transverse Momentum Mesons (R Field); Exclusive Processes and the Fundamental Structure of Hadrons (S J Brodsky); Quark-Gluon Soup -- The Perfectly Liquid Phase of QCD (U Heinz); Quarks and Anomalies (R J Crewther); Lessons from Supersymmetry: "Instead-of-Confinement" Mechanism (M Shifman); Quarks and a Unified Theory of Nature Fundamental Forces (I Antoniadis); SU(8) Family Unification with Boson-Fermion Balance (S Adler);