The birth of elementary‐particle physics

APR 01, 1982

In the 1930s and 1940s physicists significantly revised their views on the elementary constituents of matter, which during the 1920s they had assumed to be only the electron and the proton.

DOI: 10.1063/1.2915009

Laurie M. Brown

Lillian Hoddeson

By 1930, relativity and quantum mechanics were established, yet the excitement of the new physics was far from over. Indeed, the next half‐century was characterized by startling experimental and theoretical discoveries and by new puzzles that appeared wherever one looked.

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More about the authors

Laurie M. Brown, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

Lillian Hoddeson, University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign.