The notion of scaling conceived and proposed by Bjorken in 1968 played a decisive role in the conceptual development of particle physics. It was a bridge leading from the hypothetical scheme of current algebra and its sum rules to predicted and observable structural patterns of behavior in deep inelastic lepton–nucleon scattering. Both its underlying assumptions and subsequent interpretations had directly pointed to the notion of constituents of hadrons, and its experimental verifications had posed strong constraints on the construction of theories about the constituents of hadrons and their interactions.

The practical need for analyzing deep inelastic scatterings planned and performed at SLAC in the mid to late 1960s had provided Bjorken the general context and major motivation to focus on the deep inelastic kinematic region in his constructive approach to the saturation of sum rules derived from local current algebra. The deep inelastic experiments themselves, however, were not designed to test Bjorken's scaling hypothesis. Rather, the experimenters, when designing and performing their experiments, were ignorant, if not completely unaware, of the esoteric current algebra and all those concepts and issues related with it. They had their own agenda. This being said, the fact remains that the important implications of their experiments would not be properly understood and appreciated without being interpreted in terms of scaling and subsequent theoretical developments triggered by it.