  We show that the non-appearance of gluons and quarks as physical particles is
a rigorous and automatic result of the full, i.e. nonperturbative, nonabelian
nature of the color interaction in quantum chromodynamics. This makes it in
general impossible to describe the color field as a collection of elementary
quanta (gluons). Neither can a quark be an elementary quantum of the quark
field, as the color field of which it is the source is itself a source, making
isolated noninteracting quarks, crucial for a physical particle interpretation,
impossible. In geometrical language, the impossibility of quarks and gluons as
physical elementary particles arises due to the fact that the color Yang-Mills
space does not have a constant trivial curvature.
  In QCD, the particles ``gluons'' and ``quarks'' are merely artifacts of an
approximation method (the perturbative expansion) and are simply absent in the
exact theory. This also coincides with the empirical, experimental evidence.
