This years Nobel Prize for physics have been won by 3 scientists who proposed the theory to describe the force that holds together quarks, the elementary particles with which nature constructs the neutrons and protons that make up the nuclei of atoms.
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They fancifully described their force in terms of “colour”, saying that quarks could be red, green or blue, rather like electrical charge can be positive or negative; and just as electrical opposites attract, so combinations of quark colour can make for stable collections of quarks.
Their theory successfully explained why quarks tended to group in threes. It also explained why, paradoxically, the “colour charge” weakens as the quarks move together and strengthens when they move apart. It is a property that has been compared to a rubber band. The more the band is stretched, the stronger the force.
The researchers’ discoveries, published in 1973, led to the theory of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD.