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Designing for an idea before it exists
On empty seats, metaphors, and the useful parts that don’t quite fit
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There is a story from particle physics that has stayed in the back of my mind for years. I first read it in the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy’s What We Cannot Know. (There is no math in what follows, so read on without bracing yourself.)
In the early 1960s, physicists were struggling with how to organise the growing number of subatomic particles they kept discovering. Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne’eman found that many of them could be arranged inside a classification based on a symmetry called SU(3). When you placed the particles by the rule, they lined up in strangely elegant families.
But there was one seat empty.
One of those families had ten places. Only nine were filled by particles known at the time.
If the structure was really catching something about the world, then one more particle had to exist. And by looking at where the empty seat sat within the structure, you could even foresee some of its…
