A memorable scientific symposium in the new CERN Science Gateway on 31 October brought the past, present and future of electroweak exploration into vivid focus.
Half a century ago, a series of tiny tracks in a bubble chamber at CERN changed the course of particle physics. The observation of “weak neutral currents”, announced on 19 July 1973 by Paul Musset of the Gargamelle collaboration, suggested that the electromagnetic and weak forces are facets of a more fundamental electroweak interaction that ruled in the early Universe. Exploring this new sector of nature has been a core business of CERN ever since, leading to the discovery of the W and Z bosons in 1983 and culminating with the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. The weak force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, responsible for crucial processes such as radioactive beta decay. Whereas the electromagnetic force was well understood as the result of neutral photons being exchanged between charged particles, the weak interaction was harder to cast in the language of quantum theory. In the 1960s, theorists posited that the weak interaction was mediated by massive versions
Leon Lederman, former director of Fermilab, once described the development of particle physics as frequently a story of false trails, crossed wires, sloppy techniques, misconceptions and misunderstandings, occasionally compensated for by strokes of incredible luck.