Personal tales of particle physics

Abstract

The Particle Century consists of 19 articles on various aspects of particle physics, including some astrophysics and cosmology – indeed, what used to be called “big science”. Despite the title, most of the text is devoted to advances since the end of the Second World War. Written by distinguished research workers, including the Nobel laureates Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall and Carlo Rubbia, the book is intended to highlight the principal developments in this field of physics, both from the viewpoint of theoretical ideas and from the accelerator and detector technology associated with the experiments. The book introduces and discusses the advent of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the basic quark and lepton constituents of matter and the fundamental interactions between them, both on a laboratory and on a cosmological scale. And, of course, it goes back to that first experiment in particle physics – the big bang.