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Preface

This is a popular book about the history of particle theory, the study of the smallest particles of matter.

We must explain the peculiar choice of subtitle, Between Darwin and Shakespeare, which might at first appear to have no connection to physics. In part, we wanted a catchy subtitle that has never been used before.

The first of our two subtitular heroes Charles Darwin (1809–1882) achieved immortality by his publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. It transformed the subject of theoretical biology by introducing and making convincing arguments for natural selection and evolution. In our popular book, we wish to describe the evolution of the physics of particle theory up to the 21st century, quite analogous to Darwin’s discussions of evolution in biology, because there is a similar natural selection between theories based on those which agree with experiment; it is likewise a survival of the fittest.

Darwin was born in England in the west midland town of Shrewsbury in Shropshire, only 35 miles from the birthplace of the first-named author of this book in Kidderminster. Darwin had a middle-class upbringing and even in childhood showed interest in collecting and classifying beetles. In fact, he eventually displayed his talents in collecting and classifying anything biological, whether it be insects, birds, animals, fish, or plants. He had exceptional ability to think deeply for very long periods of time, sometimes years, about the specific topic he was studying.

Although we shall discuss only in the tenth and final chapter of our book our second subtitled man, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), it is worth mentioning here that Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is also 35 miles from Kidderminster in the opposite direction from Shrewsbury. Thus, Frampton was born midway between Darwin and Shakespeare, which led to our book’s subtitle, which both of us immediately liked, at a September 2019 conference within the grounds of Mon Repos Palace, where the Duke of Edinburgh was born, in Corfu, Greece. Kim was born in Gurye, South Korea, about as far from England as it is possible to be while staying within Eurasia. Our subtitle does not imply that one author contributed more than the other.

To introduce our book, we begin (Chapter 1) 3,000 years ago with the ancient Greeks, notably Democritus who introduced atoms and Archimedes who was one of the leading Greek mathematicians. From then until the renaissance, religion played a significant role (Chapter 2) in the development of scientific ideas all the way up to Galileo Galilei’s confrontation with the Catholic church.

The renaissance (Chapter 3) is characterised by a series of scientific giants who broke away from many of the Greek traditions and evolved the scientific method where theory must be confronted with experimental and observational data. A singular role was played by Isaac Newton (Chapter 4) who systematically created the field of theoretical physics, especially with his masterpiece, the Principia, published in 1687. His law of universal gravitation changed everything by showing that mathematical laws successfully described not only terrestrial experiments but also the motions of the heavenly bodies.

In Chapter 5, we discuss the 19th-century progress made by Boltzmann who assumed the existence of atoms in his work on the second law of thermodynamics. We also discuss Maxwell and his classical theory of electricity and magnetism. In the first part of the 20th century came the quantum revolution, but by the mid-1930s the list of elementary particles included only the proton, neutron, electron, photon, and the suggested neutrino.

From here, the modern particle theory evolves more rapidly. After WWII, quantum electrodynamics (QED) was successfully completed (Chapter 6) and led to unprecedented agreement with experiment. To go beyond QED, two crucial steps took place in the 1950s both involving C.N. Yang, the creation of the Yang–Mills theory, or gauge field theory, and the discovery of parity violation. At the same time, a proliferation of strongly interacting particles was discovered by experimentalists.

This chaotic situation (Chapter 7) was organised by M. Gell-Mann who discovered an SU(3) classification which successfully predicted the Ω⁻ particle and led to the idea of quarks. The unification of QED with weak interactions (Chapter 8) to an electroweak theory was initiated by Glashow, combined with the BEH mechanism by Weinberg and Salam, then completed by Glashow, Iliopoulos, and Maiani. Gauging colour in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) provided a successful theory for strong interactions and completed the standard model.

All of this remarkable progress leaves many unanswered questions (Chapter 9) including the many parameters in the standard model and the fact that only 5% of the energy of the universe is in the form of normal matter while the rest is in the yet unexplained forms of dark matter and dark energy.

We finish our book idiosyncratically with Chapter 10 which has no a priori connection with Chapters 1–9. We combine questions and comments about particle theory with quotations from Shakespeare, an Englishman with an intellect probably comparable to that of Darwin and Newton, this time in the field of English literature.

What are our qualifications? Between us, we have 100 years of experience in publishing papers about particle theory, so we have worked through the gauge theory revolution since its beginning and have this opportunity to step back and take a look from our personal perspective at the developments in the last 50 years, while in this history book, we shall begin from a time nearly 3,000 years ago.

Some other popular books on particle theory published recently include Frank Close:The Infinity Puzzle, Basic Books (2013); John Iliopoulos:The Origin of Mass, Oxford (2017); and Alvaro De Rujula: Enjoy Our Universe, Oxford (2018). We recommend all these books. Our book is different from, and complementary to, them and provides our own historical view of a truly fascinating field.

Our intended readers are educated non-scientists and scientists, and especially young people considering a career in scientific research in general and in particle theory in particular.

Paul H. Frampton and Jihn E. Kim

Luxor, Egypt

January 2020