Word: electroweak
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...late '60s Weinberg and two other physicists, Sheldon Glashow of Harvard and Abdus Salam of the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, devised a model that integrated the weak and electromagnetic forces into a so-called electroweak force and predicted the characteristics of the W and Z particles. Their theory was experimentally confirmed when a team led by Carlo Rubbia discovered the W and Z particles at the CERN accelerator near Geneva. In 1979 physicists working with an accelerator in West Germany found experimental evidence for the existence of the gluon, the strong-force carrier. Most physicists believed...
...force out. No experimental evidence has emerged to confirm the existence of its transmitting agent, the graviton. And though this hypothetical particle has been accommodated mathematically in unified theories, such models have been fatally flawed by anomalies that leave the theories meaningless. The crux of the problem: the electroweak and strong forces are quantum forces, whereas gravity is still defined only as a consequence of the curvature of space and time and thus cannot yet be explained in terms of quantum physics...
...despair: Science has made some progress towards grand unification. In 1967, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam managed to unify two of the forces, the electromagnetic and the weak, into one "electroweak" force. Together with Harvard's Higgins Professor of Physics Sheldon Glashow, the two won the 1979 Nobel Prize for their work...
...next step for scientists is to unify the electroweak force and gravity into a "Grand Unified Theory," and then, ultimately, combine this with the strong force to yield the modestly titled "Theory of Everything...
Even the highlight of Rubbia's career -- the discovery of the W and Z -- was accompanied by political machinations, says Taubes. Until late 1982 these subatomic particles were known only in theory -- the electroweak theory, which won Nobel Prizes in 1979 for Glashow and two fellow physicists. But someone still had to find concrete proof that the particles existed...