Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword: an apology
- 1 The beginning of the journey to the small: cutting paper
- 2 To molecules and atoms
- 3 The magical mystery of the quanta
- 4 Dazzling velocities
- 5 The elementary particle zoo before 1970
- 6 Life and death
- 7 The crazy kaons
- 8 The invisible quarks
- 9 Fields or bootstraps?
- 10 The Yang-Mills bonanza
- 11 Superconducting empty space: the Higgs-Kibble machine
- 12 Models
- 13 Coloring in the strong forces
- 14 The magnetic monopole
- 15 Gypsy
- 16 The brilliance of the Standard Model
- 17 Anomalies
- 18 Deceptive perfection
- 19 Weighing neutrinos
- 20 The Great Desert
- 21 Technicolor
- 22 Grand unification
- 23 Supergravity
- 24 Eleven-dimensional space-time
- 25 Attaching the superstring
- 26 Into the black hole
- 27 Theories that do not yet exist…
- 28 Dominance of the rule of the smallest
- Glossary
- Index
9 - Fields or bootstraps?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword: an apology
- 1 The beginning of the journey to the small: cutting paper
- 2 To molecules and atoms
- 3 The magical mystery of the quanta
- 4 Dazzling velocities
- 5 The elementary particle zoo before 1970
- 6 Life and death
- 7 The crazy kaons
- 8 The invisible quarks
- 9 Fields or bootstraps?
- 10 The Yang-Mills bonanza
- 11 Superconducting empty space: the Higgs-Kibble machine
- 12 Models
- 13 Coloring in the strong forces
- 14 The magnetic monopole
- 15 Gypsy
- 16 The brilliance of the Standard Model
- 17 Anomalies
- 18 Deceptive perfection
- 19 Weighing neutrinos
- 20 The Great Desert
- 21 Technicolor
- 22 Grand unification
- 23 Supergravity
- 24 Eleven-dimensional space-time
- 25 Attaching the superstring
- 26 Into the black hole
- 27 Theories that do not yet exist…
- 28 Dominance of the rule of the smallest
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
There has existed a phenomenological theory for the weak force since 1958. That is to say, there existed formulae that correctly described the effects of the weak force for all particles, under all circumstances, that could be realized in the experiments of that time, with margins of error within a small percentage. The theory could never be a fundamental theory, because it was understood that the theory would break down in more violent collision experiments. But it was also known that it would take at least a decade for the experimentalists to reach such energies in a laboratory, and so it seemed that for the time being this ‘temporary’ theory would have to be sufficient.
For the strong force there were a hotchpotch of phenomenological theories. None of these were very accurate, and this situation was obviously very unsatisfactory. The only features of the strong interactions that were well understood were its various symmetry properties and the ensuing conservation laws. Strangeness, isospin and a few other quantities were very strictly conserved for this force.
This was in striking contrast to the situation with the electromagnetic force. This has the peculiarity that it can propagate over long distances, and so this force is also experienced in the everyday world. The British physicist James Clerk Maxwell had given the mathematical formulation of electrodynamics as early as 1873 (see Figure 6).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks , pp. 49 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996