In the fifth century B.C., that prescient Greek philosopher started humanity on its search for the universe's ultimate building blocks when he suggested that al matter was made of infinitesimally small particles called atoms. In 1897, the British physicist J. J. Thomson complicated the issue when he discovered the first atomic particle, the electron. Later others recognized proton and neutron. As atom smashers grew in the next few decades the Greek alphabet soup of myriads of ephemeral particles appeared in the debris, a veritable lsidor l Rabi when the lambdas, sigmas and pions. "Who ordered that?" exclaimed the theorist muon was identified