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The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s

History, as David Gross observes in one of the pieces in this collection, is written by the victorious. Certainly most accounts, whether popular works or textbooks, of the development of particle physics portray it as a logical progression from one step to the next: theorists explained experimental results through the existence of new particles and forces; experimentalists confirmed theorists' predictions through ambitious and impressive apparatus at ever more powerful accelerators. If the current generation of students are thus taught to believe that the development of the standard model as we know it today was the smooth emergence of the inevitable, then it does them a great dis-service, as they are ill-prepared to look for the signs that will lead to the standard model of tomorrow. That is why this book is so worthwhile, timely and valuable. Its 700+ pages contain 38 descriptions of particular advances - theoretical developments and experimental results - written in most cases by those actually responsible. Most of these contributors resist the temptation of historical triumphalism and their pieces come over with the real flavour of the confusion and misdirection that characterized so much of the way things really happened. So here we have Gerson Goldhaber explaining how the definite interpretation of the peak as charmonium was held up by the difficulties with kaon identification, Martin Perl on the long struggle it took to get the `e-' events accepted as pair production, and Don Perkins on the reasons why it took so long for neutral currents to be discovered at CERN. Veltman and 't Hooft remind us how Yang-Mills theories were in the outer wilderness for many years. Prescott's beautiful experiment on polarized electron scattering is properly put in the context that the Oxford and Seattle results on parity violation in bismuth adamantly predicted a null result. Protagonists appear as real three-dimensional human characters. The level and tone of the contributions varies, but should be comprehensible by graduate or undergraduate students, perhaps with a little bit of homework in some cases. It will make excellent supplementary reading for standard courses in particle physics, any course that treats the history of particle physics should use it as vital source material, and any interested physicist will find it a good read. It deserves a wide audience and its low price (just under £25 for the paperback edition) puts no barrier in the way. Add this book to your Christmas present list today.