“Comedy of mistakes” and “drama of humans”: on the domestic contribution to the creation of The Standard Model of elemantary particle in physics

Abstract

The article explores domestic contribution to the creation of The Standard Model (SM). SM is a quantum field gauge theory of electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions, which is the basis of the modern theory of elementary particles. The process of its development covers a twenty-year period – from 1954 (the concept of non-Abelian Yang-Mills gauge fields) to the early 1970s, when the construction of renormalizable quantum chromodynamics and electroweak theory was completed. The reasons for the difficult perception of the Yang-Mills gauge field concept in the USSR are analyzed, associated primarily with the problem of “zero-charge” in quantum electrodynamics, and then in field theories of strong and weak interactions. This result, obtained by the leaders of the outstanding Russian scientific schools of theoretical physics, L. D. Landau, I. Ya. Pomeranchuk and their students, led to the rejection of the majority of Soviet physicists from field theory and to their transition to the position of a non-field phenomenological program (based on the S-matrix theory) in the construction of the theory of elementary particles.