In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks

by Gerard 't Hooft

• ISBN13: 9780521550833
• ISBN10: 0521550831
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-11-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is a first-hand account of one of the most creative and exciting periods of discovery in the history of physics. From 1960 until 1990 theoreticians and experimentalists worked together to probe deeper and deeper into the basic structure of reality, moving closer and closer to an understanding of the ultimate building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. Gerard 't Hooft was closely involved in many of the advances in the development of the subject. In this book he gives a personal account of the process by which physicists came to understand the structure of matter, and to speculate on possible directions in which the subject may evolve in the future. This fascinating personal account of the last thirty years in one of the most dramatic areas in twentieth century physics will be of interest to professional physicists and physics students, as well as the educated general reader with an interest in one of the most exciting scientific detective stories ever.

Table of Contents

An apology

1. The beginning of the journey to the small: cutting paper

2. To molecules and atoms

3. The magic 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. Colouring 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 super string

26. Into the black hole

27. Theories that do not yet exist ...

28. Dominance of the rule of the smallest.