by Yoichiro Nambu (University of Chicago, USA)

The book explains in a precise and complete manner how elementary particle physics has evolved over the past 50 years. The historical development of the ideas that have shaped our thinking about the ultimate constituents of matter is traced out. The author has been associated with some of the originators of elementary particle theory and has made significant contributions to the field. Here, he gives a first-person description of some of the main developments leading to our present view of the universe.

• What is an Elementary Particle
• Quarks and Leptons
• Looking for Quarks
• Various Accelerators
• The Birth of the Yukawa Theory
• The Appearance of New Particles
• Orderliness of Elementary Particles and Conservation Laws
• Parity and Conservation
• Composite Models of Hadrons
• The Quark Model
• Evolution of the Quark Model
• Charm and its Followers
• Quarks with Strings Attached
• What is a Parton
• Tomonaga's Renormalization Theory
• QCD — The Quantum Mechanics of Color
• Spontaneous Breaking of Symmetry
• The Leaning Structure of the Weak Interaction
• The Weinberg-Salam Theory
• The Unified Field Theory
• Program for Grand Unification