When is a particle?

JUN 01, 1978

Particle physics, like poetry, no longer hews to its former rigid rules, hence the standard for accepting quarks as elementary constituents is less severe than the neutrino’s was in the 1930’s—in fact, we may never see a quark.

DOI: 10.1063/1.2995068

Sidney D. Drell

Man’s effort to understand what we and our world are made of is one of the greatest adventure stories of the human race. It dates from the beginning of recorded history. Science first flourished 2500 years ago with the quest of the early Greek philosophers for an underlying unity to the rich diversity observed in world around them. They realized that the search for an understanding of Nature at a fundamental level in terms of basic processes and constituents necessarily carried them beyond the sensory world of appearance.

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More about the Authors

Sidney D. Drell. Stanford University.