Particle Physics

the long version

The history of particle physics goes back over one hundred years to J. B. Perrin's discovery in 1895 that cathode rays are a flow of negatively charged particles. Exactly a century later, the field of particle physics closed an important chapter with the experimental confirmation of the existence of the sixth and last quark, the top quark. This detailed chronology defines the whole discipline of particle and high-energy physics. Particle Physics: One Hundred Years of Discoveries recounts the dramatic history of the search for the ultimate constituents of matter by presenting key material on more than 500 seminal papers in particle physics. Of great interest are the actual excerpts from the original papers. This annotated, chronological bibliography presents the most influential theoretical and experimental discoveries in particle physics, many of which have been cited for the Nobel prize. A general introduction places the original articles in historical context. For each entry there is a short description explaining the importance of the discovery, followed by complete bibliographic information, including title, authors, abstracts or excerpts and references. Readers will find J. J. Thomson's original words, written in 1897, announcing the discovery of the first elementary particle, the electron; Einstein's three world-changing papers of 1905; Dirac's prediction, in 1931, of the positron; Murray Gell-Mann's 1964 proposal that hadrons are composite particles; and final confirmation of the quark theory, with the discovery in 1995 of the top quark. A complete chronological listing and author and subject indexes make the book easy to use as a reference. Particle Physics: One Hundred Years of Discoveries is a concise summing up of man's continuing efforts to uncover the ultimate secrets of nature.