the initial hard collision are soft, and cannot be treated using perturbative QCD. The question we address in the this section is one of the most simple: “If we annihilate an e $^{+}$e − pair at high energy, what particles, and in what numbers do we detect in our apparatus?” This simple question hides a multitude of very difficult issues. If taken at its most fundamental interpre- tation, it would require us to predict the mass spectrum of all hadrons, their branching ratios, as well as the physics through a probable phase change. Instead we limit our answer to just predicting the initial yield of hadrons following the (assumed) annihilation of the e $^{+}$e − pair. For the hadronic mass spectrum we use what has been phenomenologically observed [24], and we use the same source to obtain the branching ratios of every hadron. Our treatment is not without precedent. [3] assumed that after the quarks freeze into hadrons, they may be described as a hadron gas in thermodynami- cal equilibrium. [3] made no attempt to predict branching ratios or mass spectra. It will be prudent to first review the elementary facts of hadronization. The essence of hadronization is shown in figure 8.1, with the black arrow in the middle symbolising the little understood hadronization process. A computer re-enactment of a single e $^{+}$e − collision is shown in figure 8.2. It shows that for any one collision, many hadrons are produced. The precise number of hadrons produced in each collision varies, reflecting the probabilistic nature of quantum field theory. But over many collisions, we can compile an average number per collision for each hadron. A sample of these results is shown in table 8.1 (we tabulate the complete results later). The heaviest hadron detected, the Ω baryon, has a multiplicity of 0.0014, 107 8.1 Basics