The Theory of Asymptotic Freedom

In the early days of nuclear energy and atomic bombs, e equals m c squared was thought of as a recipe for getting lots of energy. But in this domain, it's just the opposite. You produce a lot of enormous amounts of energy out of which you can produce many particles. Although you don't see quarks directly, you do see these jets which reflect their properties in a way that's quite tangible. And so you can test the theory very precisely by comparing instead of because the theory is about quarks and gluons.