In physics, the eightfold way is an organizational scheme for a class of subatomic particles known as hadrons that led to the development of the quark model. American physicist Murray Gell-Mann and Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman both proposed the idea in 1961.[1][2][notes 1] The name comes from Gell-Mann's 1961 paper and is an allusion to the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism.[3]