1861-1865

James Maxwell, in a series of pages, described the interrelation of electric and magnetic fields thereby unifying them into electromagnetism. This led to the now-famous Maxwell's Equations.

1881-1884

Hertz demonstrated radio waves and established that radio waves and light are electromagnetic waves of different frequencies, as predicted by Maxwell's theory.

1967-1970

Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg proposed a theory that unifies electromagnetic and weak interactions.

They predicted the mass of the W boson which mediates weak processes such as beta decay and predicted a new type of weak interaction and its mediating particle the Z boson. Evidence for this new type of process was soon found. They also predicted the Higgs Boson.

1979

The Nobel Prize was awarded to Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg for their role in the development of the electroweak theory, four years before the discovery of the W and Z bosons!

1983

The W and Z bosons were finally discovered in 1983 by the UA-1 and UA-2 experiments at CERN.

What are the above pictures? "Events" from the CDF experiment at Fermilab in which a Z boson plus other particles are produced and the Z decays to electron plus positron (left) and to muon and anti-muon (right). The electrons and muons are very energetic and are hardly bent by the magnetic field.

These discoveries dramatically confirmed the Standard Model. Detectors at today's accelerators have observed over 100,000 W's and millions of Z's.