The place of elementary particle research in the development of modern physics

The search for elementary particles is as old as science itself. It is always the most advanced part of physics which strives for understanding of the fundamental constituents of matter. As physics progressed, the search for elementary particles moved on from chemistry to atomic physics, and then into nuclear physics. Not much more than a decade ago it separated from nuclear physics and became a new field, dealing no longer with the structure of atomic nuclei but with the structure of the constituents of nuclei, the protons and neutrons, and also with the structure of electrons and similar particles. This field is often referred to as high‐energy physics because of the fact that particle beams of extremely high energy are needed in most of its relevant experiments. This article is intended to provide a bird’s‐eye view of the innovations resulting from recent elementary‐particle research and to show how they fit into the framework of the physics of this century.

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