By Kerson Huang (ed.)
World Scientific
Hardback: £45
E-book: £34
As the proceedings of a symposium that took place in 1974 in honour of Victor Weisskopf — the well-known theoretician, who was CERN’s fifth director-general during the years 1961–1966 — this volume contains papers by leaders of physics at the time, including Max Delbrück, Murray Gell-Mann, Hans Bethe, Tsung-Dao Lee, Ben Roy Mottelson, Wolfgang K H Panofsky, Edward Purcell, Julian Schwinger, Stanisław M Ulam and others.
While some of the papers address problems in the philosophy of physics and in physics and society that are timeless in nature, the symposium has a further significance. It took place at a historic juncture of particle physics – the emergence of the Standard Model as the result of experiments that pointed to the existence of quarks. Some of the papers reflect both the pre-quark and post-quark points of view. For these reasons, these proceedings merit reissue and re-examination.
