Part VI — 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 — 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 1960s–70s.

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 — the last missing piece of the Standard Model.

MIT Lectures: QED, Feynman & the Standard Model

From MIT STS.042J — Prof. David Kaiser on QED and renormalization, the dispersion of Feynman diagrams, and the rise of quarks and the Standard Model.

A Conservative Revolution: QED and Renormalization

Teaching Feynman's Tools: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams

Quarks, QCD, and the Rise of the Standard Model

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