Miami celebrates four decades of conferences on elementary particles
The year 2004 marked the 40th anniversary of several important developments in physics, such as the experimental observation of charge-parity (CP) violation; the detection of the cosmic microwave background; the Higgs-Brout-Englert mechanism; and the publication of the quark model of hadrons, independently by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig. Coincidentally, the first Coral Gables Conference on the physics of elementary particles took place at the University of Miami in January 1964, so 2004 was also the 40th anniversary of this well known series of meetings.
It was with this rich history in mind that the physics department of the University of Miami hosted a topical conference on elementary particle physics and cosmology on 15-19 December 2004. More than 80 physicists from several countries attended this first in a new series of meetings, the so-called Miami 2004 Conference, which took place primarily at the Sonesta Beach Resort on Key Biscayne, Florida.
The focus of Miami 2004 was on recent discoveries and developments in particle physics and cosmology. Approximately half the talks were on dark matter, dark energy or neutrino physics, approximately one-sixth were on quarks and lattice quantum chromodynamics, and the rest were on more theoretical themes involving Lorentz invariance, CPT, gravity, strings, branes and unification beyond the Standard Model.
Two awards were presented at the conference banquet to honour Arnold Perlmutter and Sydney Meshkov, each having attended 33 meetings on particle physics in south Florida since 1964. Both attended the very first Coral Gables Conference, which they helped the late Behram Kursunoglu plan and organize. These awards are for first-time attendees of south Florida conferences to encourage younger physicists to participate in future meetings of the new series, and were given to Lisa Everett and Daniel Chung. They consisted of software packages provided by the manufacturers Wolfram Research and MacKichan Software.
A highlight of the meeting was an historical colloquium, given by George Zweig, detailing his role in the discovery of the quark model 40 years ago. As is well known, Gell-Mann took the name of these fractionally charged constituents of hadrons from a phrase appearing in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. It is perhaps less well known that Zweig made his independent discovery of the model while a post-doctoral fellow at CERN.
The venue for Zweig's talk differed from that of the other presentations. It took place in the Lowe Art Museum of the University of Miami, hence the paintings in the backgrounds of the photographs shown here. The first Coral Gables Conference also took place in the Lowe Museum, in the very same Beaux Arts Gallery. Thus were the historical aspects of the meeting further emphasized. A reception followed the colloquium, provided by the College of Arts and Sciences of the university.
• Complete lists of the session organizers and conference participants, as well as the meeting programme and other details, are available at http://server.physics.miami.edu/~cgc/Miami2004.html.
Further reading
A video of Zweig's talk is avilable at: www.physics.miami.edu/~cgc/zweig-presentation-300kbps.avi
To play it requires the DIVX codec http://www.divx.com or the VLC player http://www.videolan.org.
The talk was based on a report Zweig wrote in 1980, published in Baryon 1980 : proceedings, University of Toronto. Scanned versions are avaliable at: http://ccdb3fs.kek.jp/cgi-bin/img_index?8102237.