Didn't really need to (it's already burned into my brain), but it was a fun read anyway. Here's a quick summary at Wikipedia. Lecture notes from the early 60s, there are a handful of topics he touches on as current puzzles, but for which there were fruitful investigations right around the corner. Specifically:
- some time spent on puzzling out the developing periodic chart of mesons, largely answered via quark theory beginning in 1964.
- a good discussion of quantum weirdness, followed by some mention of hidden variables. The hidden variable hypothesis has largely been discarded, stating with Bell's theorem circa 1964 and follow-on experiments.
- the Higgs mechanism as a way to explain mass, also initially published in 1964.
Just noticing it, 1964 was a pretty hot year for physics. I was busy discovering that food would fall if I dropped it off my high-chair tray.
Anyway, highly recommended. If you read the book, be sure to skim the above Wikipedia links to see where some of the then-puzzling topics finally led.
No comments:
Post a Comment