The pion, the mediator of the nuclear force proposed in 1935 by Yukawa. The first particle discovered in the cosmic rays looked like the pion, but was later found to be a lepton, the muon. Experiments at high altitudes on cosmic rays led finally to the discovery of the pion. More experiments soon showed other surprises, the strange particles.

How the properties of the charged pion have been measured.

The discoveries of the charged leptons and of the neutrinos.

How, in 1928, A. M. Dirac found the fundamental relativistic wave equation and the Dirac Lagrangian. Dirac’s fundamental predictions of the existence for each fermion of an antiparticle with the same mass but opposite ‘charges’. How the positron and the antiproton were discovered. The important concepts of helicity and chirality.

The Majorana equation for completely neutral fermions.

This chapter provides an analytical framework for the empirical studies comprised in the volume. It starts by defining the relevant temporalities to study party strategies and sociostructural processes of electoral realignment. The chapter then develops the concept of the “social democratic idea” that underlies the entire left field of political parties. The third section defines four key structural challenges to the social democratic idea and the potential responses and trade-offs resulting from them for the left field. The fourth section discusses party strategic alternatives to respond to structural challenges and transformations of the social democratic electorate and then differentiates this discussion by different contexts characterized by political-economic legacies and institutions. The chapter concludes with an outline of the book.

The toolbox for subnuclear physics.

How the Lorentz transformations can be found from basic properties of space-time, independently of electromagnetism, as in the usual presentations. Lorentz-invariance is a common property of all the fundamental interactions.

Clear discussion of the fundamental concepts of energy, momentum and mass; of their relations; and of their transformations between reference systems, in particular the laboratory and centre of mass frames.

The sources of high-energy particles, cosmic rays and the different types of accelerators. The progress of our knowledge is fully linked to the experimental ‘art’ of detector design and development. Detectors are made of matter, solid or liquid, or gaseous. The interactions of charged and neutral high-energy particles with matter are described. The principal types of detector and the principles of their operation are introduced.

The fascinating new world inside the nucleon, of quarks, gluons and colour, the nuclear strong force. How quantum chromodynamics (QCD) was discovered: probing the nucleons with scattering experiments and with increasing energy e+e− colliders, where quarks and gluons appear as hadronic jets.

The colour charges are three. Being the gauge of QCD non-Abelian, the gluons, not only the quarks, are ‘coloured’. How colour charges bind three quarks or a quark–antiquark pair forming hadrons that have zero overall colour charges.

The QCD coupling constant runs as the fine-structure constant, but with increasing momentum transfer, it decreases, instead of growing. Quarks become ‘free’, when they are very close to each other. Only a very small fraction of the proton mass is due to the quark masses, 99% being the energy of the colour field. The QCD vacuum, the status of minimum energy, a very active medium indeed, beautiful to study.

When matter first appeared in the universe, in the first microsecond after the Big Bang, quarks and gluons moved freely in a hot ‘soup’, the quark–gluon plasma. It is created in the laboratory in the ultra-relativistic heavy ion colliders and theoretically analysed with lattice QCD

This short chapter touches on the limitations of the SM. The SM does not include gravity, and it does not explain the major components of the mass–energy budget of the universe, dark matter and dark energy, the latter being probably the cosmological constant. CP violation in the quark sector is too small to explain the matter–antimatter asymmetry of the Universe, but, if confirmed, the non-SM CP violation in the neutrino sector might be large enough. The ‘strong CP violation’ problem might be solved with the existence of a very light particle, the axion; experiments are reaching the requested sensitivity. Supersymmetric particles present in some extensions of the SM have been searched for, but not found so far.

The SM contains too many free parameters: the masses of the fermions and of the bosons, and the mixing angles. The masses of the fermions, from neutrinos to the top quark, span 13 orders of magnitude. Why such big difference? Why is mixing small in the quark sector, and large in the neutrino sector? Why do the proton and the electron have exactly equal (and opposite) charges? Why are there just three families? Are there any spatial dimensions beyond the three we know? And so on.

This chapter is based on fieldwork with scientists studying the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) in Bhutan and Guatemala, who are advancing relational, interdependent models of development. Departing from growth models that focus on nutrient inputs and the mother’s body, these scientists employ ‘fishbone’ modelling (Bhutan) and the ‘dirty chicken hypothesis’ (Guatemala) to chart growth in relation to ecological surroundings. Turning the conversation of child development towards the effects of lead toxicity and chronic inflammation caused by microbial and other contaminants, their work offers an alternative to individualising, mother-focused origin stories of malnutrition. The chapter considers how visions of interdependent ontogeny (biological development) help reimagine the sites of health, disease, and global development.

The concept of ’causal crypticity’ was introduced by Richardson (2021) to describe the DOHaD field’s high tolerance for both causes and effects that are challenging to observe in nature, show small effect sizes, and are unstable across study populations and contexts. Causal crypticity can be understood in three ways: as an epistemic norm; as a boundary-delimiting signature of field culture or epistemic style; and as a promissory mode. Increasingly, causal crypticity characterises many fields of the big data-rich, postgenomic life sciences, making DOHaD science a useful index case for scholars of the history, philosophy, and social studies of science interested in the epistemic terrain and social implications of postgenomic sciences. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ethical and accountable claimsmaking in DOHaD science under conditions of causal crypticity.

Concept formation in the wild may be understood as dialectical interplay of evolution and design. Formative interventions such as the Change Laboratory operate in zones where evolution and design meet. Their message may be condensed as “Do not try to dictate the shape of change; get involved in it and allow your own preconceived ideas be transformed in the process.” This requires first of all participatory analysis of the historical development of the contradictions at hand. It is the contradictions experienced and identified by the participants, not the vision of the interventionist, that give direction to the change effort. The second condition is object-orientation. When the object is kept in focus and given a voice, the interventionist’s preconceived ideas are challenged and often fade into the background.

The concluding chapter first provides a brief summary of the main findings reported in the multiple complementary investigations on which this book reports. The second task of the conclusion to this volume is to address influential alternative accounts that have attracted considerable scholarly attention and to discuss them considering the cumulative empirical evidence we have presented throughout this book. On the one hand, rival accounts challenge that there is any durable structure of voter-party alignments left in contemporary party systems and democratic polities have entered a world of fluidity, in which the tactical moves of – (social) media enabled – political entrepreneurs are what really counts. On the other hand, a different tier of rival accounts sees not partisan dealignment and the fluidity of media democracy as the problem of traditional left-wing parties, but the failure of social democratic parties to act on the disempowerment of wage earners by capitalist business interests whose leverage has been magnified through globalization of the movement of goods, services, people, and capital. In the very brief third and final section of this book, we posit that the partisan realignments of the past generation on which we report in this volume may not generate a durable equilibrium of party competition. In the twenty-first century, party politicians may be able to map still a subset of novel upcoming emerging policy issues on the existing dimensions of partisan alignment. But there may be profound political challenges in the offing that could disorganize existing party systems fundamentally.