Madam Chien Shiung Wu, the great physicist of 20th century physics, passed away in February 1997. Born in 1912, she became a towering scientific figure in the second half of the century. Madam Wu and Madame Curie will forever be commemorated as the two great female physicists of the 20th century. On 16-18 August 1997, scientists from around the globe, many of them distinguished in their own right, gathered in Nanjing, where Madam Wu spent her undergraduate years to celebrate the glorious achievements of the great lady.This important volume constitutes the proceedings of the conference. The main advances in fundamental symmetry, nuclear, particle and general physics since parity symmetry breaking and the prospects at the turn of the century are addressed by world-renowned experts. The historical developments in the studies of the β-decay mechanism, vector current conservation, parity, charge conjugation and time reversal nonconservation are vividly depicted by Madam Wu's close friends, including several Nobel laureates.

Publisher description

The topics in this volume range from mathematical aspects of the theory of the Poincar‚ group, Clifford algebras and the CPT theorem, through new theoretical physical constructions and concepts (such as the physical significance of the 4-potential, the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity, Majorana-like models, the photon as a composite particle, action-at-a-distance and superluminal phenomena), to experiments in neutrino physics. The book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers working in fundamental physics and phenomenology, and also to experimentalists.

Madam Chien Shiung Wu, the epitome of 20th century physics, passed away in February 1997. Born in 1912, she became a towering scientific figure in the second half of the century. Madam Wu and Madame Curie will forever be commemorated as the two great female physicists of the 20th century. On 15-18 August 1997, scientists from around the globe, many of them distinguished in their own right, gathered in Nanjing, where Madam Wu spent much of her youth, to celebrate the glorious achievements of the great lady. This important volume constitutes the proceedings of the conference. The main advances in fundamental symmetry, nuclear and particle physics since parity symmetry breaking and the prospects at the turn of the century axe addressed by world-renowned experts. The historical developments in the studies of the b-decay mechanism, vector current conservation, parity, charge conjugation and time reversal nonconservation are vividly depicted by Madam Wu's close friends, including several Nobel laureates.

This conference provided a comprehensive overview of the areas where fixed target experiments made significant contributions so that experimenters could see what work was left to be done. Since experiments at colliders contribute strongly in many of these areas, the participation of collider experimenters was welcomed and this edition of the conference contains many contributions from the collider community. In order to try to cover the huge amount of physics included in studies of heavy quarks, many of the contributions are review types, including both theoretical and experimental overviews in seven different areas: CP violation and mixing; heavy ions; production dynamics and structure functions; hadronic decays; semileptonic and leptonic decays; spectroscopy; and rare and forbidden decays. This volume is divided into these seven areas of interest.