by Necia Grant Cooper (Editor), Geoffrey B. West (Editor)
This lively well-illustrated collection of articles written by a group of particle physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory presents to the expert and non-expert alike a comprehensive overview of the major theoretical and experimental advances of the past twenty years. It explains the emergence of a profoundly new understanding of the fundamental forces of Nature. With the unification of the weak and electromagnetic interaction, physicists now stand at the brink of a complete unification of all the forces, including gravity. This achievement brought with it a rich vocabulary of names and concepts: quarks, gluons and nonabelian gauge theories. The exposition of these ideas, done on a variety of technical levels is designed to interest a broad audience ranging from the professional theorist and experimentalist to the inquisitive student. Anyone with an interest in particle physics can enjoy this book.