science · 10 November 1974 · 50 years ago
In 1974, the discovery of the “charmed quark” subatomic particle was announced simultaneously by the two American experimental groups responsible. One was an MIT group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the other a SLAC-Berkeley group on the west coast at Stanford Linear accelerator centre. The new particle, of mass 3095 MeV had a lifetime about 1000 times more than that of other particles of comparable mass. This announcement set on fire the world of high energy physics and is now known in the physics community as the November revolution. Within two years, in 1976, the scientists leading those groups, Samuel Ting and Burton Richter, were awarded the Nobel prize in physics.
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