The Greatest Story Ever Told...So Far

by Lawrence M. Krauss

After all, Maxwell’s unification made the beautiful prediction that light was an electromagnetic wave whose speed could be calculated from first principles, and lo and behold, the prediction was equal to the measured speed of light. Einstein’s unification of space and time predicted that clocks would slow for moving observers, and lo and behold, they do, and in just the way he predicted. In 1967 the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions predicted three new vector bosons that were almost one hundred times heavier than any particle that had been yet detected. It also predicted new interactions between electrons and neutrinos and matter due to the newly predicted Z particle that had not only not been seen, but a number of experiments suggested did not exist. It also required the existence of a new and as yet unobserved massive fundamental scalar boson, the Higgs particle, when no fundamental scalar particles were yet known to exist in nature. And finally, as a quantum theory, no one knew if it made sense. Is it any wonder that the idea did not immediately catch fire? Nevertheless, within a decade everything would change, resulting in the most theoretically productive period for elementary particle physics since the discovery of quantum mechanics. While a gauge theory of the weak interaction started the ball rolling, what resulted was far greater.