Part VI ā Chapter 17
Particle Physics & the Standard Model
The quest for nature's most fundamental building blocks
17.1 The Particle Zoo
In the 1950s and 60s, particle accelerators and cosmic ray detectors revealed hundreds of new particles ā pions, kaons, lambdas, and more. Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig proposed that hadrons are made of quarks.
17.2 The Standard Model
The Standard Model describes all known fundamental particles and three of the four forces (electromagnetic, weak, and strong). It was assembled through the work of Weinberg, Salam, Glashow, 't Hooft, and many others in the 1960sā70s.
17.3 The Higgs Boson
The Higgs mechanism, proposed in 1964, explained how particles acquire mass. On July 4, 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider ā the last missing piece of the Standard Model.