For years, physicists have sought for and found unified theories.
- 1861-1865
- James Maxwell, in a series of pages,
described the interrelation of electric
and magnetic fields thereby unifying them into electromagnetism.
This led to the now-famous Maxwell's Equations.
- 1881-1884
- Hertz demonstrated radio
waves and established that radio waves and light are
electromagnetic waves of different frequencies,
as predicted by Maxwell's theory.
- 1967-1970
- Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg proposed a theory that unifies
electromagnetic and weak interactions.
They predicted the mass of the
W boson which mediates weak processes such as beta
decay and predicted a new type of
weak interaction and its mediating particle the Z
boson. Evidence for this new type of process was soon found.
They also predicted the Higgs Boson.
- 1979
- The Nobel Prize was awarded to Glashow, Salam, and
Weinberg for their role
in the development of the electroweak theory,
four years before the discovery of
the W and Z bosons!
- 1983
- The W and Z bosons were finally discovered in 1983 by the UA-1 and
UA-2 experiments at CERN.
These discoveries dramatically confirmed the Standard Model.
Detectors at today's accelerators have observed over 100,000 W's and millions of Z's.