Abstract
Since ancient Greek times, philosophers and scientists have sought the ultimate building blocks of nature. For a while and throughout the 1950s, many thought they’d found them all. But, just as drama and excitement are among the great qualities of physics, so is frustration. And since the early 1960s, every time physicists began to think they’d found all of the basic particles, a new one would appear to tease them. As former presidential science advisor Robert Bacher told me in his office at Caltech, “it seemed like a bottomless pit.”1
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Endnotes
Interview with Robert Bacher, June 1984, California Institute of Technology.
P. A. M. Dirac, Nobel Prize Address, 1933, as reprinted in Timothy Ferris, editor, The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics (Little, Brown, Boston, 1991), p. 83.
P. A. M. Dirac, Nobel Prize Address, 1933, as reprinted in Timothy Ferris, editor, The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics (Little, Brown, Boston, 1991), p. 84.
See Laurie Brown and Lillian Hoddeson, “The Birth of Elementary-Particle Physics,” Physics Today, April 1982.
Ibid.
See Laurie M. Brown, “The Idea of the Neutrino,” Physics Today, September 1978, for more on theoretical work on the nucleus during this period.
See also Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978), p. 231.
From Robert Millikan to J. Robert Oppenheimer, personal letter of August 31 (from the Archives of the California Institute of Technology).
See Laurie Brown and Lillian Hoddeson, “The Birth of Elementary-Particle Physics,” Physics Today, April 1982.
Interview of Linus Pauling by John Heilbron, March 27, 1964.
Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978), p. 233.
Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner, “The Young Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections,” Physics Today, April 1980.
Hans Bethe and Walter Heitler, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series A, 1934, 146:83.
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© 1993 Anthony Serafini
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Serafini, A. (1993). Carl Anderson and Antimatter. In: Legends in Their Own Time. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6090-0_12
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