Beginning in the 1950s with the work of Yang and Mills, following the previous lead of Weyl and Pauli, deep explorations illuminated the types of symmetries and invariances any field theory must satisfy. QED, and indeed, all field theories, were generalized to a class of quantum field theories known as gauge theories. That symmetries dictate, limit and necessitate the form of interaction between particles is the essence of the "gauge theory revolution". Yang and Mills formulated the first explicit example of a non-abelian gauge theory, Yang–Mills theory, with an attempted explanation of the strong interactions in mind. The strong interactions were then (incorrectly) understood in the mid-1950s, to be mediated by the pi-mesons, the particles predicted by Hideki Yukawa in 1935, based on his profound reflections concerning the reciprocal connection between the mass of any force-mediating particle and the range of the force it mediates. This was allowed by the uncertainty principle. In the absence of dynamical information, Murray Gell-Mann pioneered the extraction of physical predictions from sheer non-abelian symmetry considerations, and introduced non-abelian Lie groups to current algebra and so the gauge theories that came to supersede it.