SALAM, Abdus and Clive Ward, "Electromagnetic and Weak Interactions" in Physics Letters 13, pp. 168-171, in the volume of 368p. Bound in a deep blue cloth; two stamps on the title page, otherwise this is a very fine copy. Nobel Prize in Physics for this work in 1979. $300
- First attempt at at a synthesis between electromagnetism and the weak interaction (1500+ citations].
[Reprinted in “Selected papers of Abdus Salam”, editor A. Ali et al., p. 210-213; “Gauge theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions”, editor C. H. Lai, p. 181-184.]
“One of the recurrent dreams in elementary particles physics is that of a possible fundamental synthesis between electromagnetism and weak interactions. The idea has its origin in the following shared characteristics: 1) Both forces affect equally all forms of matter-leptons as well as hadrons. 2) Both are vector in character. 3) Both (individually) possess universal coupling strengths. Since universality and vector character are features of a gauge-theory these shared characteristics suggest that weak forces just like the electromagnetic forces arise from a gauge principle...”--in “Chronology of Milestone Events in Particle Physics” (online).
"Beginning in the late 1950s, Salam's group at Imperial had become perhaps the most active of the groups working in gauge theories during a period in which quantum field theories had been displaced by another approach, the S-matrix model. While many theorists were looking toward this latter method in the hopes of avoiding the seemingly intractable difficulties that had begun to arise with field-theoretic calculations, Salam believed that a more "fundamental" explanation would have to come from invoking the standard perturbation method for quantum field theory. This conviction, shared by his collaborators at Imperial, was transmitted to his students. In 1964 the group started a research program on gauge theories. The aim of this program was to find the mathematical group of transformations that left "invariant" the laws that rule an interaction: The question was whether or not the interaction depended on certain physical properties of the particles, such as electric charge or other "quantum numbers."The aim was to find symmetry groups that showed that interactions that seem essentially different are just manifestations of a more general one, such as in the electromagnetic theory, in which Salam's goal was to unify electromagnetic and weak interactions." --Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography online.
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