Symmetries of Elementary Particles Revisited

Many of us became interested in symmetries of particles and in group theory, a major theme of these series of conferences Symmetries in Science, in the sixties because of the very remarkable symmetry properties of the newly found many fundamental particles at that time. One was very curious about the origin of these symmetries. What have we learned about the origin of these symmetries. What have we learned about these mysterious symmetries after some thirty years? The symmetries were mainly the occurrence of octets and decouplets in the states of mesons baryons and heavy leptons which where attributed to the representations of the internal symmetry group SU(3). Why SU(3), what does it mean? Well, we have not solved it, but pushed the problem a bit further under the carpet, we did not explain the symmetries, nor the group SU(3),but we assigned the same symmetries, or the same quantum numbers to hypothetical particles called quarkes, without really explaining them.