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  description of the weak force was incomplete. According to his theory the probability for a reaction at very high energies could exceed 1, which is impossible. It was therefore important to study the weak force at high energies, but the problem was how! It was possible to produce beams of particles with high energy,…

  The neutrino is the most elusive of the known elementary particles. It has no electric charge and, as far as we know, no rest mass. The neutrino hardly interacts with matter at all. It can go through lead with a thickness of 10 000 billion kilometres (one light year) without interacting. The neutrino interacts…

  There are four fundamental forces acting in nature: the gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, the strong and the weak force. If one compares the strength of the different forces, setting the gravitational force at 1, the proportion becomes:   the gravitational force 1   the weak force 1031   the electromagnetic force 1036  …

    The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, (press release). L. Lederman, The two-neutrino experiment, Scientific American, March 1963, page 60. New Scientist, 29 October 1988, page 30. Discovery of two kinds of neutrinos. Adventures in experimental physics, editor Bogdan Maglich, Oct 1972, page 81.  

  Matter is composed of two types of particles, leptons and hadrons. The hadrons are constructed of quarks, while the leptons do not seem to be constructed of other constituents. As the experiment of the Nobel Prize winners so convincingly showed, the leptons are grouped in pairs. This grouping into pairs also occurs for the…

  In order to understand how the weak force works and to explore the possible existence of two neutrinos, it was necessary to study neutrino interactions at high energies. Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger were working to achieve a sufficiently intense neutrino beam for several years. This neutrino beam was produced in several…

Contents:     Based on materials from the 1988 Nobel Poster for Physics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to Leon M. Lederman Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois, USA Melvin Schwartz Digital Pathways Inc., Mountain View, California, USA Jack Steinberger CERN, Geneva, Switzerland   for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons…