Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Unification of fundamental forces
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The unifying concepts of physics in the past
- 3 The concept of elementarity and nuclear forces
- 4 The unification of the weak nuclear force with electromagnetism
- 5 The strong nuclear force as a gauge force and the standard model
- 6 Beyond the standard model
- 7 Envoi
- History unfolding: an introduction to the two 1968 lectures by W. Heisenberg and P. A. M. Dirac
- Theory, criticism, and a philosophy
- Methods in theoretical physics
5 - The strong nuclear force as a gauge force and the standard model
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Unification of fundamental forces
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The unifying concepts of physics in the past
- 3 The concept of elementarity and nuclear forces
- 4 The unification of the weak nuclear force with electromagnetism
- 5 The strong nuclear force as a gauge force and the standard model
- 6 Beyond the standard model
- 7 Envoi
- History unfolding: an introduction to the two 1968 lectures by W. Heisenberg and P. A. M. Dirac
- Theory, criticism, and a philosophy
- Methods in theoretical physics
Summary
The strong nuclear force and the gluons as gauge particles
Together with the “electroweak” force, comprising the weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism, there have been parallel developments in identifying the gauge aspects of the strong nuclear force, also mediated by messengers of spin-one – the so-called gluons (so that one has come to believe more and more in the validity of the gauge ideas). These developments started in the early 1970s and culminated in the “indirect” findings of gluons at the DESY Laboratory at Hamburg in 1979.
The story starts with three doublets of quark flavours (u, d), (c, s) and (t, b). It turns out that there are not just six but eighteen distinct quarks, distinguished from each other by COLOUR. Each quark comes in three colours which have once again been given whimsical names like Red (R), Yellow (Y) and Blue (B). A postulated symmetry between these three colours would give rise to eight gauge particles – the so-called gluons.
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- Information
- Unification of Fundamental ForcesThe First 1988 Dirac Memorial Lecture, pp. 59 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990