Glashow submitted "Partial-Symmetries Of Weak Interactions"#OTD in 1960, an important step towards electroweak unification. It answered the question: How can there be a symmetry between electromagnetism and the weak interaction if one conserves parity but the other does not?
Electromagnetism is based on the exchange of the photon, a massless and electrically neutral vector boson. Schwinger had proposed in the late 1950s that weak interactions were mediated by the exchange of two charged and massive vector bosons called the W^{+} and W^{-}.
Electromagnetic interactions (as well as gravity and the strong interaction, as far as we know) conserve parity. That means the rules work the same way and produce the same results if we replace everything with its mirror reflection.
But the weak interaction *does not* work this way, a possibility that was first proposed by Yang and Lee in 1956 and then famously confirmed by Chien Shiung Wu's experiment the following year.
Physicists were stumped trying to cobble together a framework in which the photon and the W bosons had such different properties. Glashow's paper, which appeared in 1961, offered a resolution to the puzzle of how one interaction would conserve parity and the other would not.
Glashow suggested that a model with a bigger symmetry group – SU(2) x U(1) – and a *fourth* vector boson – the "Z" – was needed. He showed how one of the bosons could be responsible for a parity-conserving interaction, while the others mediated an interaction that violates it.
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The physicist Niels Bohr was born #OTD in 1885. He applied Planck’s new ideas about quanta to develop the first modern model of atomic structure in 1913, which motivated the development of quantum mechanics over the next few decades.
Inage: Atomic Heritage Foundation
Here’s a thread from last year about the historical context for his model, and how it set physicists on the path to quantum mechanics.
A story about Bohr. In 1939, Rosenfeld told the Princeton Physics Journal Club about his work with Bohr on fission, after Meitner & Frisch's discovery but before its publication. Bohr quickly wrote a letter to Nature asserting priority of Meitner & Frisch. nature.com/articles/14333…
Koba & Takeda submitted their paper "Radiation Reaction in Collision Processes, III" to the journal Progress of Theoretical Physics #OTD in 1948. It described a method for calculating certain quantities in quantum electrodynamics via "transition diagrams." academic.oup.com/ptp/article/4/…
Their paper was submitted just two days before Freeman Dyson's ground-breaking article on Feynman diagrams was submitted to Physical Review. The approaches are very similar, as was clear to all three scientists!
Upon learning of their results, Dyson amended his own paper to recognize their work. He lamented the effect of the war on the dissemination of important ideas: "The isolation of these Japanese workers has undoubtedly constituted a serious loss to theoretical physics."
He took out a full page ad in the newspaper demanding the death penalty for five black kids who turned out to be innocent, and still insisted on their guilt even after the real perpetrator confessed.
Here is the ad Trump placed in all four of New York’s major newspapers, months before the end of the trial, when I’d assume presumption of innocence would still apply.
Then in 2014 he *wrote an op-ed* in the Daily News saying they were probably still guilty, even though someone else confessed to the crime. nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-c…
Sputnik 1, the first satellite made by humans, was launched into low Earth orbit #OTD in 1957.
Image: NSSDC, NASA
The launch of Sputnik marked the beginning of the Space Age. Here, let a young Jeff Goldblum show you what the mood was like in the Pentagon.
Before young squire Goldblum was warning us about the perils of toying with dinosaur DNA (@SUEtheTrex), he was racing down the hallways of the Pentagon with the latest bit of intel on the threat from above.