“The best way to think of these vibrational states is to picture them as occurring on a violin string. As you no doubt know, a violin string can vibrate with one, two, or more loops along its length [see Figure 2]. Nambu and his colleagues noticed that these vibrational modes could be related to the hadrons. One of the hadrons, for example, corresponded to a string with a single loop, another to one with two loops, and so on. This is not so strange if you stop for a moment and think about it....