Was Nambu's idea of color charge widely accepted initially?
The notion of color charge for quarks, which was essential for building a consistent theory of the strong nuclear force, did face initial challenges. It emerged as a way to reconcile the Pauli Exclusion Principle with the existence of baryons made of identical quarks. The concept, which I proposed in the context of a systematics of hadrons, essentially introduced a new quantum number, 'color,' with three states for each quark flavor. This abstract property, like a hidden symmetry, ultimately proved to be the correct and most elegant way to describe the interactions governed by the strong force, leading to the development of quantum chromodynamics.
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