MESON2000 Conference Summary Page: 3 of 11
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summary printed on March 22, 2001
tury Europe entered very troubled times indeed, from which we are only
now emerging. One should note that good things can arise even in times
of adversity, such as the reappearance of an independent Poland in 1919.
Physics also went through crises at the beginning of the 20th century, but
we must all agree that the resulting quantum physics and relativity are two
of the most exciting and fascinating developments in the field.
Against this 600 year historical background the development of hadron
physics has been strikingly rapid. The identification of the compact atomic
nucleus, the home of most terrestrial hadrons, was due to Rutherford in
1911. The identification of the positively charged proton, the first known
hadron, can also be dated to about 1911. The first meson to be identified
was the pion, found by Lattes et al. in 1947 (in cosmic rays), and it had
been anticipated by Yukawa as the carrier of the strong nuclear force. The
familiar light mesons K, p, w etc were found in the late 1950s to early 1960s,
and the identification of these and the light baryons suggested the quark
model to Zweig, Gell-Mann and Ne'emann in about 1963. The identification
of QCD as the theory of the strong interaction, in 1973, was due mainly
to its property of asymptotic freedom, which had been observed at SLAC
in the late 1960s. The crucial confining property of QCD was at the time
regarded as an unproven conjecture, and is still poorly understood. The mid
to late 1970s saw the experimental establishment of the charm and beauty
families of hadrons, the first searches for glueballs, and the development of
new theoretical techniques such as LGT. The remarkable QCD predictions
of glueballs and exotic mesons have taken longer to test experimentally,
and the more widely accepted experimental candidates for these states were
identified in the middle 1990s. This short time scale is most reassuring; in
Fig.1 we can see that almost all the progress in strong interaction physics
has been made in the last 10% of the timeline, and the study of QCD itself
occupies only the final 5%.
And finally, as if to close the circle, at the end of the millennium many
theoreticians have again turned to theological speculations which are not
amenable to experimental confirmation.
2. The Many Phases of the Meson Community
After the first few plenary talks I was confirmed in my suspicion that
hadron physics, even meson physics, is a very broad field with clearly iden-
tifiable communities that have little overlap. Since much of the work in
contributing to a new field involves learning the field's terminology or "jar-
gon", one can identify the different communities by the rate of recurrence
of characteristic words or expressions in research papers or presentations at
conferences.3
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Barnes, T. MESON2000 Conference Summary, article, April 26, 2001; Tennessee. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc720589/m1/3/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.