The catalogue of fundamental constituents and the field theories that describe them.
13 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Standard Model
Don Lincoln (Fermilab) · 2012
Walks through the particles and forces of the Standard Model for a general audience, explaining what each piece does and why physicists think…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Nobel Lecture: The Neutrino: From Poltergeist to Particle
Frederick Reines · 1995
Recounts the reactor experiment that finally caught the neutrino directly, decades after Pauli proposed it as a way to save energy conservation…
Primary sources and full treatments.
Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics
Richard P. Feynman · 1949
Recasts quantum electrodynamics as a sum over spacetime histories of particles, introducing the diagrams that turned an intractable calculation into…
+12 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Don Lincoln (Fermilab)
Walks through the particles and forces of the Standard Model for a general audience, explaining what each piece does and why physicists think something is still missing from it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frederick Reines
Recounts the reactor experiment that finally caught the neutrino directly, decades after Pauli proposed it as a way to save energy conservation rather than as a particle anyone expected to detect.
24 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Richard P. Feynman
Recasts quantum electrodynamics as a sum over spacetime histories of particles, introducing the diagrams that turned an intractable calculation into a systematic one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Howard Georgi & Sheldon L. Glashow
Proposes that the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces are three residues of a single force broken at very high energy, founding the idea of grand unification.
Steven Weinberg
Explains how requiring a local gauge symmetry, broken spontaneously rather than by hand, unifies the weak force and electromagnetism into one theory.
16 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Kenneth G. Wilson
Argues that a divergent theory can be made to make sense by tracking how its parameters change with the scale at which you look, rather than by cancelling infinities by hand.
25 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Stephen P. Martin
Introduces supersymmetry as the minimal extension pairing every known particle with a partner of different spin, and works through why that pairing stabilises the Higgs mass against quantum corrections.
128 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026B. Ananthanarayan
Reviews the motivation, the group-theoretic machinery and the circumstantial evidence for unifying the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces — the pedagogical route into the grand-unification program Georgi and Glashow founded with SU(5).
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gerardus 't Hooft
Shows that Yang-Mills gauge theories, including the ones with spontaneously broken symmetry that give particles mass, can be renormalised and so make finite predictions.
23 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026David J. Gross
Recounts how the strong force gets weaker at short distances rather than stronger, the discovery that made quantum chromodynamics a calculable theory.
31 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Andrey Grozin
Works through the Feynman-diagram machinery of QED and QCD to two loops, showing how renormalisation is actually carried out in a calculation rather than stated as a principle.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Yoichiro Nambu
Argues that particle masses can arise the way superconductivity does — from a symmetric theory settling into an asymmetric ground state — carrying the idea over from condensed matter into particle physics.
13 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026