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
Acknowledgements
This project was casually started at Café Aktaion, looking at the old Castle of Corfu, during the recepton meeting of the Workshop on Connecting Insights in Fundamental Physics: Standard Model and Beyond, held in Corfu Island in the summer of 2019. So, we are greatly indebted to the organizer of this workshop, George Zoupanos, on the current atomic theory. He mentioned in the opening speech of the conference the stories of the ancient Greek philosophers, and even touched on the earlier story on Odyssey after the Trojan War, having lived here in Kanoni, Corfu, for 10 years before returning to his wife.
The first author thanks all the colleagues and students who have added to his knowledge of particle theory over the past 50 years. At an educational level, Simon Altmann was his tutor at Brasenose College, Oxford, as an undergraduate, John Clayton Taylor was his DPhil supervisor in Oxford as a postgraduate, and Yoichiro Nambu was his first postdoc mentor in Chicago. From all of these people he learned an enormous amount about physics. It was a unique opportunity to collaborate with Sheldon Glashow for over two decades during which they wrote 13 papers. Selected physicists who have taught him a lot include Gerard ’t Hooft, Lars Brink, Peter Goddard, Cecilia Jarlskog, Tom Kephart, Peter Minkowski, and Holger Nielsen. Apologies to the very many other physicists not explicitly mentioned but who nevertheless provided collegiality.
The second author deeply thanks Chong-Hyun Park who is an Academician on Greek Philosophy in Korea National Academy of Science. Dr. Park translated all of Plato’s Greek dialogues and provide a vivid view on the old Greek society. The narration on the Greek period in this book was carefully commented by their Greek colleague Emmanuel Paschos, probably the best physicist aware of the ancient stories of Greeks and the Dark Ages. On Catholitism, their friend Stephen Barr, the author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, carefully commented on the initial narration on the Dark Ages. The second author also thanks the chief priest of a Korean Buddhist temple Yakcheon-Sa, Dr. Sung Ku Kim, for laboriously explaining the story of Buddha’s teaching. The authors also thank MooYoung Choi, A. Karpov, Young Duk Kim, Seo-Dong Shin, Kietae Rhie, Yannis Rizos, Jose Valle, and John Vergados for valuable suggestions. JEK’s deepest debt of gratitute is to Hyo Hee for safe advice and to Saem for drawing beautiful figures.