Beschreibung
First edition of Feynman's theory of the weak interaction, which "Feynman often considered . . . to be his greatest success: for the first time, he had discovered a genuine law of nature" (DSB). "By the mid-1950s, Feynman's interests had returned to his original passion: high-energy physics. Since his triumph with QED, the field had moved on to a series of new conundrums. Among them loomed the nature of nuclear forces. One type of force, dubbed the 'weak force', led nuclei to decay, as in radioactivity. Although weak-force phenomena had been well studied for decades, a big shock came in the late 1950s, when experiments confirmed some theoretical speculations about the symmetries obeyed by this nuclear force. Until that time, most physicists simply assumed that the weak force obeyed parity; that is, reversing all spatial coordinates from plus (right-handed) to minus (left-handed) and vice versa would leave the underlying physics unchanged. Not so, as new experiments confirmed in 1957: the weak force violated parity . . . Soon after parity violation had been confirmed experimentally, Feynman developed a first-principles description of the weak force, one that incorporated this basic handedness from the start. By this time, nearly all physicists assumed that the weak force, much like the other fundamental forces, arose from the exchange of certain particles (just as the electromagnetic force arose, at the quantum-mechanical level, from the exchange of photons, as described by QED). The question remained: what types of particles carried the weak force, and what were the means by which these force-carriers coupled with other types of matter? At a conference of high-energy physicists in 1957, Feynman suggested that the weak force might arise from a particular combination of couplings: part vector coupling and part axial vector, or V - A. (These designations refer to the behavior of the particles interactions under special-relativity transformations.) Around the same time, Murray Gell-Mann Feynman's younger colleague and friendly rival at Caltech arrived at the same conclusion. Rather than see his two star theorists devolve into a messy priority dispute, Caltech's physics department chair, Robert Bacher, wisely suggested that Feynman and Gell-Mann publish an article together. Their paper, titled 'Theory of the Fermi Interaction', arrived at Physical Review in September 1957, just days before another pair of theorists, the University of Rochester's Robert Marshak and his graduate student, E. C. George Sudarshan, presented a similar theory at a conference in Italy. (In fact, Marshak and Sudarshan had visited with Gell-Mann in California a few months earlier, while Feynman was vacationing in Brazil.)" (ibid.). Large 8vo, pp. [ii], 226. Original printed wrappers. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers ABE-1609865623386
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