Revolutionary new concepts about elementary particles,
space and time, and the structure of matter began to emerge in the mid-1970s.
Theory got far ahead of experiment with radical new ideas such as grand
unification and supersymmetry, but the concepts have never been
experimentally tested. Now all that is about to change. The LHC the Large
Hadron Collider has finally been built and is about to confront theory with
experiment. This course is devoted to these theoretical ideas and how
they will be tested.
This
course is the first of a three-quarter sequence of classes exploring the New
Revolutions in Particle Physics. This material focuses on the
Basic Concepts of particle
physics.
While these courses build upon one another, each course also
stands on its own, and both individually and collectively they let students
attain the "theoretical minimum" for thinking intelligently about modern
physics.
Leonard Susskind, Felix Bloch Professor of Physics
Leonard Susskind received a PhD from Cornell University and has taught at Stanford since 1979. He has won both the Pregel Award from the New York Academy of Science and the J.J. Sakurai Prize in theoretical particle physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
