THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ELEMENTARY PHYSICS

Elementary particle physics: The origins

I. The Mists of Scotland S25 II. ‘‘Cosmic Rays Go Downward, Dr. Anderson’’ S25 III. On Making a Particle Take a Photograph of Itself S26 IV. The Slow Discovery of the Mesotron S27 V. The Mesotron is Not the Yukon S28 VI. ‘‘Even a Theoretician Might be Able To Do It’’ S28 VII. The Reservoir of Ideas Runneth Over S29 VIII. ‘‘There is No Excellent Beauty That Hath Not Some Strangeness in the Propo...

Supersymmetry in Elementary Particle Physics

These lectures give a general introduction to supersymmetry, emphasizing its application to models of elementary particle physics at the 100 GeV energy scale. I discuss the following topics: the construction of supersymmetric Lagrangians with scalars, fermions, and gauge bosons, the structure and mass spectrum of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), the measurement of the parameter...

Elementary Physics in the Cellular Automaton Universe

General relativity is a mathematical model that uses sophisticated geometry to describe simple physics. It agrees with experiment in the few tests that can be made, but the whole edifice is not physics. Instead of using observations to test that model, I derive a simple empirical model of elementary physics and cosmology from the observations. The observations imply that the universe is a finit...

SUPERSYMMETRY IN PARTICLE PHYSICS An Elementary Introduction

Evolution of Elementary Particle Physics in the 20th Century

The history of physics from the middle of the 19th century until 2000 is presented. The dominant drive for the development is related to the creation of Quantum Mechanics in the first half of the 20th century. New concepts like the particle-wave duality and the definition of an elementary particle are discussed. The explosion of the number of particles, due to new accelerators, led to the theor...