Abstract: The answer to the question, "Are we really made of quarks?", is yes; but physicists did not arrive at this answer easily.  The quark model, which embodied a radically new conceptual view of the structure of matter, was fiercely debated and generally rejected by the physics community.  Its ultimate acceptance took well over a decade and occurred only after inescapable and compelling experimental evidence, but

free quarks have never been observed.  This talk will describe how physicists came to this seemingly strange conclusion and discuss the implications of such a picture on our concept of matter.

Professor Jerome Friedman is a 1990 Nobel Prize Winner