In 1987, Robert Willett and James P. Eisenstein, at Bell Laboratories, observed together with Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui something that broke the known pattern of the fractional quantum Hall effect: a new step of quantized resistance at filling fraction 5/2, the first even-denominator state ever detected, when until then all observed fractional states had odd denominators — a regularity believed to be a direct consequence of the Pauli exclusion principle. In 1987 the finding lacked a theoretical explanation for why the pattern broke precisely there. Two years later, in 1989, Jainendra K. Jain, working as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, solves the problem with a radical change of perspective: he proposes that each electron, upon binding to an even number of quanta of magnetic flux, transforms into a new quasiparticle — the composite fermion — which experiences a much weaker effective magnetic field than the actual applied field. The idea explains at a single stroke the entire intricate sequence of fractional Hall states observed in the laboratory (the 'Jain states') as if they were simply the integer quantum Hall effect but seen from the perspective of composite fermions instead of electrons; it further predicts that, at fraction 5/2, the behavior should resemble that of a superconductor. For several years the theory remains a conceptual framework without direct experimental verification of its strangest prediction: that these quasiparticles carry an electric charge that is an exact fraction of the electron's, and obey anomalous quantum statistics, intermediate between those of fermions and bosons. That verification comes from the laboratory of Mordehai (Moty) Heiblum, at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he develops ultra-high-purity semiconductor heterostructures and electron interferometry and shot-noise interpretation techniques that allow, for the first time, direct observation of the predicted fractional charge (1997) and, later, confirmation of the anomalous statistics and the quantized half-integer thermal conductance at fraction 5/2 — evidence that the corresponding composite fermions are, in fact, Majorana fermions, particles with potential implications for fault-tolerant topological quantum computing. None of the three pieces alone constitutes a paradigm shift: the 1987 experiment is an anomaly with no theoretical framework; Jain's composite-fermion theory would have been an elegant mathematical construction with no experimental confirmation that the predicted quasiparticles actually exist in nature; and Heiblum's verification would have been meaningless without the theory explaining what to look for and why. Together, they lay the complete conceptual foundations of fractional quantum Hall effect physics.