The Supersymmetric World. The Beginnings of the Theory
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Author(s): G. Kane and M. Shifman (Eds)
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 981024522X
Format: hardback
271pp
Review Date: 27 March 2001
Review: This book charts the history or supersymmetry, an invariance of the theory under interchange of fermions and bosons, from its discovery in the early 1970s to the present day. Since its discovery over 30 000 papers have been published in this field - a chain of work which interpolates, more or less continuously, from its inception to the present day. Currently supersymmetry dominates high-energy physics and many believe that it will play the same revolutionary role in the physics of this new century as special and general relativity did in the last. The story is told mainly in the words of the people who participated in the work. It is a mixture of anecdotal descriptions and personal memories with more technical accounts of the trailblazers, covering the birth of the theory and its first few years - the origin of the idea, four-dimensional field theory realisation, and supergravity.