李政道诺贝尔领奖辞lee-lecture.pdf.pdfVIP

TSUNG DAO LE E Weak interactions and nonconservation of parity Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1957 In the previous talk Professor Yang 1 has outlined to you the position of our understanding concerning the various symmetry principles in physics prior to the end of last year. Since then, in the short period of one year, the proper roles of these principles in various physical processes have been greatly clar- ified. This remarkably rapid development is made possible only through the efforts and ingenuity of many physicists in various laboratories all over the world. To have a proper perspective and understanding of these new exper- imental results it may be desirable to review very briefly our knowledge about elementary particles and their interactions. The family of elementary particles that we know today consists of numerous members. Each member is characterized, among other properties, by its mass, charge, and spin. These members are separated into two main groups: the « heavy particle » group and the « light particle » group. The well-known examples of the heavy particles are protons and neutrons; those of the light particles are photons and electrons. Apart from the obvious implication that a heavy particle is heavier than a light particle, this classification stems from the observation that a single heavy particle cannot disintegrate into light par- ticles even if such disintegration should be compatible with the conservation laws of charge, energy, momentum, and angular momentum. This fact is more precisely formulated as the « law of conservation of heavy particles » which states that if to each heavy particle we assign a heavy particle number , to each anti-heavy particle a heavy particle number -1 , and to each +1 light particle a correspondin g number 0, then in all known physical pro- cesses the algebraic sum of the heavy par