Two Quark Colors of the Cold War: Schism of Narratives

In 2025, the physics community marked 60 years since the introduction of quark color—yet its dual origins remain conceptually underexamined. I argue that in 1964–65, what later was dubbed “color” emerged in two ontologically distinct forms: Greenberg’s parafermi model, invoking an SO(3)-like hidden degree of freedom, and two SU(3)-based constructions—by Han–Nambu and by Struminsky et al. in Dubna and —that posited an internal triplet symmetry to resolve the Pauli paradox. Though Greenberg’s algebra was not SU(3), his model was later shown to reproduce SU(3) classification, aligning with the other proposals. By contrast, the Dubna line, while correctly employing SU(3), lacked color dynamics and remained embedded in a holist ontology emphasizing symmetry and composite structure over local gauge dynamics.

That only Greenberg and Han–Nambu are canonized in QCD’s dominant narrative reflects more than the Cold War priority politics: it marks an epistemic shift. I trace how the consolidation of gauge-theoretic entity realism and the underdetermination of early color proposals favored those formulations compatible with emerging field-theoretic norms. The Dubna formulation was not assimilated into the QCD canon primarily not due to oversight, but because it instantiated a distinct ontological commitment and a distinct narrative —where color symmetry served holistic classification rather than local gauge dynamics.