James Daniel "BJ" Bjorken (born 1934) is an American theoretical physicist. Bjorken discovered what is known as light-cone scaling, (or "Bjorken scaling") a phenomenon in the deep inelastic scattering of light on strongly interacting particles, known as hadrons (such as protons and neutrons). This was critical to the recognition of quarks as actual elementary particles (rather than just convenient theoretical constructs), and led to the theory of strong interactions known as quantum chromodynamics. In Bjorken's picture, the quarks become point-like, observable objects at very short distances (high energies). Read more