Quarks in the Bootstrap Era

The quark model emerged from the Gell-Mann–Ne’eman flavor SU(3) symmetry. Its development, in the context of strong interactions, took place in a heuristic theoretical framework, referred to as the Bootstrap Era. Setting the background for the dominant ideas in strong interaction of the early 1960s, we outline some aspects of the constituent quark model. An independent theoretical development was the emergence of hadron duality in 1967, leading to a realization of the Bootstrap idea by relating hadron resonances (in the s-channel) with Regge pole trajectories (in tand u-channels). The synthesis of duality with the quark-model has been achieved by duality diagrams, serving as a conceptual framework for discussing many aspects of hadron dynamics toward the end of the 1960s.