Gross and Wilczek had been discussing this from a very different point of view. They were interested in asymptotic freedom in field theory for its own sake. They thought that an asymptotically free theory would be superior and, as we… as we discussed a long time ago in these... in this interview, there is always the possibility in fact that a field theory that’s not asymptotically free is actually self-inconsistent. So they were interested in that, and when it turned out that the renormalization group effect on the propagator in Yang-Mills theory is the opposite to what it is in quantum electrodynamics, that was a very important point. It was found by 't Hooft, but 't Hooft didn't do anything with it.

[Q] You didn’t mention Politzer either.

It was found... no, I'm going to in a moment... it was found by Politzer and also around the same time by Gross and Wilczek. But they used it... Gross and Wilczek used that fact to point out that therefore a Yang-Mills theory, if you didn't have too many fermions in it, would be asymptotically free. Furthermore, not only was the asymptotic freedom something that they had been looking at for a long time because they liked it; it was also the explanation for the Bjorken, Feynman and so on and so on perception that the quarks, anti-quarks and gluons were almost free at very small distances in very high... high momentum transfers.