In a fanciful allusion to Buddhist philosophy, Gell-Mann called his organizing scheme the Eightfold Way. Complexity was reduced to simplicity again. But there is an important difference between the architecture of Mendeleev and the architecture of the Eightfold Way. And it is here that one can glimpse the enormity of the intellectual upheaval brought on by Gell-Mann and his colleagues. The periodic table, now a commonplace in any high school chemistry course, classifies the elements according to properties we can perceive with our senses.
Every element is characterized by a unique mass and charge.
In its ability to sift pattern from chaos, the Eightfold Way is at least as powerful, but tantalizingly more subtle. The qualities Gell-Mann used to arrange the subatomic particles were far more abstract than charge and mass. In his scheme, particles were classified according to elusive qualities called isospin and strangeness, which have no counterpart in the world of everyday experience. To describe the invisible patterns said to underlie the material world, Gell-Mann's strangeness was soon followed by more new qualities with names like charm, truth, and beauty. All of his great breakthroughs came from playing with symbols on paper and chalkboards.