The Eightfold Way is a theory independent put forward independently by American and Israeli physicists Murray Gell Mann and Yuval Ne'eman organizingspin 1/2 baryons - consisting of three quarks - and mesons - consisting of two quarks - into octets or groups of eight.
Strangeness of the particles is shown vertically and charge diagonally upwards to the left. The Eightfold Way may be understood as a consequence of flavor symmetries between quarks. The strong nuclear force affects quarks inthe same way regardless of their flavor, so replacing one flavor of quark with another in a hadron should not alter its mass very much. The quarks form what is known in Maths as a group.
The theory was supported by the discovery of the discovery of the
\[\Omega^{-}\]
particle with a charge of -1, strangeness of -3 and tmaas predicted by the full version of the theory when extended to particles with other spins..