A History of Particle Physics from 1964 to 1979
Based on a conference held at Stanford University, this book gives the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of an exciting physics revolution--the rise of the Standard Model. The third volume of a series recounting the history of particle physics, this volume focuses on the Standard Model, which explains the microstructure of the world in terms of quarks and leptons and their interactions. Major contributors include Steven Weinberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Michael Redhead, Silvan Schweber, Leon Lederman, and John Heilbron. A collaboration of physicists and historians of science, the wide-ranging articles explore the detailed scientific experiments, the institutional settings in which they took place, and the ways in which the many details of the puzzle fit together to account for the Standard Model.
Several accounts have been written of the discovery of neutral weak currents,
mainly by social scientists or theoreticians.1 Although doubtless well motivated,
these authors were themselves not immersed in the experimental situation in
neutrino physics in the 1960s and 1970s. There have also been, of course,
nonhistorical reviews of the physics of neutral currents.2 In this chapter I shall
present an experimenter's account of the sequence of events in this discovery,
based on my own ...
