Popular and Unpopular Ideas in Particle Physics

DEC 01, 1986

As particle physics becomes a deeper but more difficult field, there is too much emphasis on fashionable ideas and the search for anomalies, and too little reward for improving accelerators and detectors.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881045

Martin L. Perl

I finished writing this article while the 23rd International Conference on High‐Energy Physics was taking place in Berkeley. California. It was a wellorganized conference with a variety of theoretical talks, comprehensive plenary lectures and many reports on new experiments. Yet the atmosphere of the conference could be summed up in one word: waiting. The participants knew that no major experimental or theoretical advance in particle physics was to be announced at this conference. They listened to the experimental and theoretical results, but they were prepared to wait until the next conference for a breakthrough.

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References

1. For a review of all models see F. J. Gilman, SLAC Publication No. 3898, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford, Calif. (1986), submitted to Commun. Nucl. Part. Phys.
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4. M. L. Perl, New Scientist, 2 January 1986, p. 24.
5. For a discussion of the sociological aspects of the increase in the size of particle‐physics experiments, see A. R. Pickering, W. P. Trower, Nature 318, 243 (1985).https://doi.org/NATUAS
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More about the authors

Martin L. Perl, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford, California.