gillam%AEROSPACE@sri-unix.UUCP (06/14/83)
From: gillam at AEROSPACE (April Gillam) The Z0 and the W intermediate vector bosons have been discovered at CERN. (There were something like 128 collaborators from many countries -- everyone was looking for these particles!) It is thought that they act as the intermediary in weak (radioactive decay) interactions as photons do for electromagnetics interactions. The mass of each of the two particles is greater than 80 times that of the proton. The New York Times(May 29, 1983) in an article by Heinz Pagels says, "By the late 1960's, Dr. Steven Weinberg... and Dr. Salam at Imperial College, London, devised a field theory that unified the weak and electromagnetic forces. At the heart of their theory, which was based on the earlier work of scientists including Dr. Sheldon Glashow, also at Harvard, was the idea that the weak and electromagnetic fields were unified by a symmetry transformation... The weak and electromagnetic fields could be interchanged because of the mathematical symmetry of the Weinberg-Salam theory." Even tho the math is symmetric the solutions to the equations, which describes the forces and particles, needn't be. Hope this tells you a little of what's going on. I also find it fascinating, but reliable news isn't always so easy to get. It's not clear that the New York Times writers understand the significance of scientific events all that well... - April Gillam