Hadron bootstrap: triumph or frustration?

Abstract

Physicists usually perceive their discipline's goal as the reduction of nature to fundamentals, and the high‐energy arena has correspondingly been dominated by the search for “basic building blocks.” Finding the quark is for the moment regarded by many as the ultimate prospective triumph; failure to find some such fundamental entity is equated with frustration. There exists, nonetheless, a 180‐degree inverted point of view, which envisions the absence of fundamentals as the ultimate triumph; this is the bootstrap attitude.