Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Road to Quarks
- 2 The Discovery of Quarks
- 3 Alvin Virgil Tollestrup
- 4 Richard Phillips Feynman
- 5 Murray Gell-Mann
- 6 A Deeper Layer of Reality
- 7 Epilogue
- A A Primer on Quarks
- B The First CERN Report
- Glossary: A Guide for the Perplexed
- Acknowledgments
- Further Reading
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The Road to Quarks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2025
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Road to Quarks
- 2 The Discovery of Quarks
- 3 Alvin Virgil Tollestrup
- 4 Richard Phillips Feynman
- 5 Murray Gell-Mann
- 6 A Deeper Layer of Reality
- 7 Epilogue
- A A Primer on Quarks
- B The First CERN Report
- Glossary: A Guide for the Perplexed
- Acknowledgments
- Further Reading
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter 1, “The Road to Quarks,” traces the period from 1896, with Henri Becquerel’s accidental discovery of radioactivity, to 1935 with Hideki Yukawa’s theory of the nuclear force.
Discoveries of radioactivity by Becquerel; the nucleus by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, as interpreted by Ernest Rutherford; the range of the nuclear force by Rutherford and James Chadwick; and the discovery of the neutron by Chadwick, are briefly described. Concepts from quantum mechanics and quantum field theory necessary to explain Heisenberg’s unsuccessful attempt to understand the nuclear force, and Yukawa’s successful theory of pion exchange, are explained. These include Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, quantum fluctuations of quantum fields, and virtual particles as the carriers of force.
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- Discovering QuarksRemembering Feynman, Gell-Mann, and Tollestrup, pp. 1 - 13Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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