50 years ago, physics underwent a major revolution
Excerpt from the November 23, 1974 issue of Science News
Physicists Samuel Ting (shown) and Burton Richter independently discovered the subatomic particle J/psi in 1974. It quickly led to more discoveries that confirmed quarks are fundamental building blocks of matter.
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A surprising new particle — Science News, November 23, 1974
To add to the present ferment and confusion in particle physics, nature now presents the oddest new particle to turn up in many years…. Theorists are at a loss for the moment about what to do with it…. The new particle is the heaviest yet found … and its lifetime of 10-18 seconds … is long for a particle of that mass. There must be some unheard of kind of structure to keep the particle together for so long.
Update
The newfound subatomic particle, called J/psi, could be explained only as a mash-up of a new type of quark, the charm quark, and its antimatter counterpart. This discovery, known as the November revolution, spurred others that finally confirmed that quarks are fundamental building blocks of matter — a cornerstone of the standard model of particle physics (SN: 4/8/21). J/psi still perplexes scientists. For instance, researchers with the ATLAS experiment, a particle detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, are working to figure out how exactly the particles are produced in high-energy proton smashups.
