Particle Physics: One Hundred Years of Discoveries: An Annotated Chronological Bibliography

Abstract

This is a fascinating book, which will be of interest to all particle physicists and others who wish to follow the astounding developments in our understanding of the basic constituents and forces of Nature in the hundred years from the discovery of the electron to that of the top quark. It takes the form of a chronological bibliography, with an extract from each listed article and a clear statement of its main contribution, together with copious references to related papers. Thus the authors can claim with some (but not complete) justification that they `chronicle the history of particle physics ... with citations of virtually all the significant papers, both experimental and theoretical, right and wrong'. Needless to say the wrong papers are not identified, but fortunately not many are included, and the main impression is of the triumph of quantum field theory and the brilliant elaboration and confirmation of what is nowadays called the Standard Model of Particle Physics. It is the excerpts from the original papers, almost all in English translation, that prevent the book from being simply a dry list of achievements. They convey the excitement of discovery, the changes in style of scientific writing over the years (mostly, it must be said, for the worse), and sometimes even something of the personalities involved. One can contrast, for example, the sprightly first-person narrative of Becquerel with the ponderous sentences of Bohr. Naturally, the level is such that one needs to be fairly familiar already with quantum theory and particle physics to follow the unfolding story. It is inevitable that this book will come to be used as an arbiter of significance and precedence, which is a pity because no reference work can be perfect in that respect. All knowledgeable readers will find some of the omissions and inclusions surprising. The authors are mainly from two groups of particle data archivists, one from Protvino, Moscow, the other from Berkeley, California, and they err in favour of some Russian papers of doubtful significance on one hand, and some routine confirmations of resonance discoveries on the other. The author index is flooded by unknown members of the modern giant experimental collaborations, while some great individual contributors do not appear at all, even in `related references'. Some I would have liked to see recognized are Yu Dokshitzer for his work on QCD evolution equations, contemporaneous with the listed paper of Altarelli and Parisi, T Kinoshita for his heroic calculations of the electron magnetic moment (only the experimental confirmation is included), B Touschek for the invention of chiral symmetry and the development of electron-positron colliders, G Veneziano for the invention of dual models of hadrons, and R Wideröe for the idea of colliding beams, albeit expressed in a patent rather than a journal article. The recent probable discovery of neutrino oscillations also makes it likely that papers on this topic, notably that of V Gribov and B Pontecorvo, will need to be included in future editions. More irksome for many theorists will be the omission of any reference to supersymmetry, string theory or other theoretical notions not yet directly confirmed by experiment. Part of the excitement of particle physics is that this may change at any moment and a whole new era of discoveries will then be set in motion.