In physics, the eightfold way is an organizational scheme for a class of subatomic particles known as hadrons that led to the development of the quark model. The American physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman independently and simultaneously proposed the idea in 1961. The name comes from Gell-Mann's (1961) paper, "The Eightfold Way: A theory of strong interaction symmetry." It is an allusion to the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism and was meant to be a joke.