Customer Reviews

Weak Interactions and Modern Particle Theory

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By the time Dover published this, the book had become a classic.
It starts with a hard Noether theorem for conserved current.
On page 127 the books states that neutrinos should be massless.
On page 27 it gives an argument for the Higgs mechanism.
What has changed since 1984?
The neutrino has mass and the Higgs boson hasn't yet been found where it was predicted.
Also further particles that aren't in the standard model of physics are predicted by astronomical observations:
dark matter particles and dark energy.
We are faced with the idea that there may be a statistical mechanics besides the classical
bosons and leptons. None of that really changes that this book broke new ground in making available the ideas of the, then, new physics.
Hawking predicted an end to physics as a result of these theories ( and was wrong). I think one of the major problems with weak field physics
is the Feynman diagrams for Z(0) And W(+/-) interactions don't
balance energetically ( the intermediate, excited states are too large by
many powers of ten).
The failure of the standard model appears to be not one of design, but of not taking enough into account. As hard as this book is or as advanced, the truth seems to be even more of Lie algebras at higher symmetries...