The book explains in a precise and complete manner how elementary particle physics has evolved over the past 50 years. The historical development of the ideas that have shaped our thinking about the ultimate constituents of matter is traced out. The author has been associated with some of the originators of elementary particle theory and has made significant contributions to the field. Here, he gives a first-person description of some of the main developments leading to our present view of the universe.
Contents:
What is an Elementary Particle
Quarks and Leptons
Looking for Quarks
Various Accelerators
The Birth of the Yukawa Theory
The Appearance of New Particles
Orderliness of Elementary Particles and Conservation Laws
Parity and Conservation
Composite Models of Hadrons
The Quark Model
Evolution of the Quark Model
Charm and its Followers
Quarks with Strings Attached
What is a Parton
Tomonaga's Renormalization Theory
QCD — The Quantum Mechanics of Color
Spontaneous Breaking of Symmetry
The Leaning Structure of the Weak Interaction
The Weinberg-Salam Theory
The Unified Field Theory
Program for Grand Unification
Readership: General.