The Standard Model of particle physics represents one of the triumphs of modern physics. With the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, all of the particles in the Standard Model have now been observed. The main aim of this book is to provide a broad overview of our current understanding of particle physics. It is intended to be suitable for final-year undergraduate physics students and also can serve as an introductory graduate-level text. The emphasis is very much on the modern view of particle physics with the aim of providing a solid grounding in a wide range of topics.

Our current understanding of the sub-atomic Universe is based on a number of profound theoretical ideas that are embodied in the Standard Model of particle physics. However, the development of the Standard Model would not have been possible without a close interplay between theory and experiment, and the structure of this book tries to reflects this. In most chapters, theoretical concepts are developed and then are related to the current experimental results. Because particle physics is mostly concerned with fundamental objects, it is (in some sense) a relatively straightforward subject. Consequently, even at the undergraduate level, it is quite possible to perform calculations that can be related directly to the recent experiments at the forefront of the subject.

Pedagogical approach

In writing this textbook I have tried to develop the subject matter in a clear and accessible manner and thought long and hard about what material to include.

By the late eighteenth century, the European empires had become imperial nation-states, and the framework within which European history in this period unfolded included both colonial powers and colonies, colonizers and colonized peoples. Colonial subjects were pulled into the economic, political, and cultural systems of empire by the force of conquest, colonial government, and the daily presence of colonizers in their midst. These forces attempted, as we have seen, to control multiple aspects of the lives of the Americans, Pacific islanders, Asians, and Africans who came under colonial rule. While never perfect, this control increased as European states improved their ability to exert power both in Europe and in the colonies. Europeans also felt the force of empire, and European versions of themselves and their home countries were shaped by their colonial experiences. It was virtually impossible for any European to live without contact with the empire and its colonial holdings, products, and peoples. Their perceptions of such central aspects of European civilization as property relations, human and civil rights, political democracy, and industrial capitalism were marked by the colonial empires. All Europeans, as isolated as they may have been from their country’s colonies, were drawn into the imperial nation-state.

Governance by these imperial nation-states was marked by paradoxes and contradictions. The creation of colonial empires brought European states and peoples into close contact with non-Europeans and with parts of the world distant from Europe. Yet these states dedicated significant resources to maintaining boundaries between Europeans and the people they found there. European states were able to project their power into corners of the globe previously inaccessible to them. A remarkably small number of Europeans managed to govern large numbers of non-Europeans and huge swatches of territory. Each of these states also met limits to their power, as they were unable to gain their desired control over territory, colonial subjects, and colonists. The colonial state was a work constantly in progress, but its ultimate end was failure, not only because of resistance and eventual decolonization, but also because even on its best days there were things that the colonial state simply could not get people in the colonies to do.

In the course of the nineteenth century, European outposts on the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean coasts of Africa were pushed inland. Accounts of this extension of European control point to multiple factors in this process: crises of European capitalism, a desire for employment for European elites, a “gentlemanly capitalism” that resulted from the common interests of the British landed elite and the financial and service sector of southeast England, technological improvements, or a “social imperialism” that would focus European workers less on the injustices of European society and more on the power of European nations. While with different emphases, these narratives have in common their focus on events such as the initial European forays into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1870s, the “loaded pause” of the early 1880s, the Berlin Africa Conference of 1884–85, and the “scramble” that divided up the continent by the turn of the century. The Berlin Conference in particular is often seen as the prelude to “Scramble” and “Partition” by setting out the rules for the expansion of European control in West and Central Africa – notification of the other European powers and effective occupation – and consolidating Belgian control of the Congo Free State. Recent research has undercut this preeminent role for the Conference, and in the middle of the twentieth century, the emphasis on the “Partition” itself was critiqued by two historians of the British empire, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson. They noted a period of “informal empire,” in the first half of the nineteenth century, that gave way to formal empire only when necessary to maintain British influence and control in a particular part of Africa. Seeing a basic continuity between the middle and the end of the nineteenth century, Robinson and Gallagher argued that this policy was in fact one of “extending control informally if possible and formally if necessary.” They also emphasized the importance of strategic considerations – especially concerns about India – in the “official mind” of British imperialism, and insisted that imperial expansion had been influenced not only by European actors but also by Africans.

The attempts by the early modern empires of Spain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Great Britain to restructure themselves in the last decades of the eighteenth century were not limited to the Atlantic basin. European ships had been in the Pacific since the sixteenth century, but now they discovered new islands and peoples. What had been largely a “Spanish lake” saw ships, and eventually settlers, from many European countries in its waters after the middle of the eighteenth century. Voyages of exploration and scientific inquiry of the late eighteenth century were followed by whalers, traders, missionaries, and convicts. The encounter with Oceania provided descriptions of plant and animal life, geological formations, and climatic conditions that helped Europeans such as Joseph Banks and Charles Darwin rethink some of the fundamental assumptions of European culture about the world. Europeans also created a fictitious island paradise in Tahiti, and attempted to recreate versions of European society in New Zealand and Australia. As they did so, the interactions between Europeans and the Pacific changed.

The European relationship to Asia also changed at this time. From the shift from purely commercial to colonial links by the British East India Company in the late eighteenth century through the Revolt in 1857 and the assumption of direct control by the British government, India became the quintessential British colony. It was a subject of major importance in British politics from the 1760s on, and the financing of the British state became intimately connected to the fortunes of the British East India Company. Long-standing French religious and commercial ties to Indochina were the foundation on which missionaries and adventurous military officers built a Southeast Asian empire in the last third of the nineteenth century. Elsewhere in Asia, the Dutch East Indies became significant contributors to the revenues of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch state. All of these colonies raised issues about the relationship not only of Asians to European settlers, but also those of European descent born in Asia to the metropole in Europe.

The end of empire in the middle of the twentieth century is in many recountings an uncomplicated finale to the story of European colonial expansion and rule. In this view, indigenous elites demanded autonomy and eventually independence for the colonies in which they lived. In the British empire, this accelerated attempts to move colonies along a path to membership in the Commonwealth of Nations, while at the same time transforming the Commonwealth away from political federation towards an economic trading zone. In the French empire, the longtime practices that considered the empire to be a constituent part of the Republic led first to an unsuccessful war in Indochina and then an even more disastrous one in Algeria. These major imperial defeats were paralleled by Belgian withdrawal from the Congo, the Dutch departure from Indonesia and, in the 1970s, the end of the last European empire, the African possessions of Portugal. No matter what the vision of empire that had existed in the imperial powers in 1945, therefore, those empires were quickly liquidated.

These colonial conflicts make up one of the most remarkable events of twentieth-century history, and they often seem to have been inevitable. There had, of course, been doubts about the value of the colonies on the part of some Europeans almost from the beginnings of the empires, with the controversies over the Atlantic empires in the late eighteenth century and the decades preceding the Partition of Africa particularly marked by these concerns among the intellectual and political elites of the colonial powers. In the twentieth century these arose again. The contradictions of colonial rule that had caused unease in the writings of E. M. Forster and Joseph Conrad became more apparent leading up to World War II. The collapse of colonial rule in the first years of World War II seemed to many observers to confirm the critiques of the “degeneracy” of the West that had been prevalent for more than a generation. Visitors to the colonies during the 1930s and after World War II, such as the British novelists W. Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess and the French poet Jean Cocteau, were struck by the apparent moral degeneracy of European colonial society, and the phrase “whisky-swilling planters” seemed accurate to many.

A principal minister of a European colonial power in the early 1730s, such as Robert Walpole in Great Britain or Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury in France, might be forgiven if he looked out from Westminster or Versailles with a relatively rosy view of the world. Both men were at the height of their domestic power. They enjoyed the confidence of their royal masters, George II and Louis XV. They had created political systems, albeit of very different kinds, that effectively managed the domestic factionalism that periodically plagued European monarchies: “Cock Robin” Walpole dominated the Houses of Parliament through a combination of personal persuasiveness and what a generation later would be called “Old Corruption.” Fleury was the master of backstairs deal-brokering with other ministers of state and the Royal Council. The diplomatic conflicts of the turn of the century also seemed to be over. Great Britain’s colonial holdings in North America appeared to be secure, as did France’s in New France, the new colony of Louisiana, and the Caribbean islands that were producers of valuable commodities like sugar and coffee.

Walpole and Fleury both left office in the early 1740s, Walpole through resignation, Fleury through death. Unfortunately for their successors, and rulers in other imperial powers of the time, neither European diplomacy, nor domestic politics, nor colonial empires remained as placid in the second half of the eighteenth century as they had seemed in 1730. This was especially the case in the Atlantic basin. Rivalries between the European powers became more intense in the 1740s, and the Atlantic colonies became a major theater for the wars that occurred in each decade of the remainder of the eighteenth century. The costs in men and money of fighting wars on a global scale made the European powers seek changes in their relationships with their Atlantic colonies. Pressures from expanding trade cracked the mercantilist economic structures of the empires, as colonial merchants pushed new policies on their imperial governments or simply evaded or ignored imperial restrictions. Between the middle of the eighteenth century and the end of the first third of the nineteenth, the control exercised by Britain, Spain, Portugal, and France over territories from Canada to the southern cone of South America changed dramatically.

In the summer of 1701, around 1,300 representatives of almost forty nations gathered in Montreal to sign what became known as the Great Peace of Montreal. Only one of the nations present, the French who hosted the gathering, was European. The others were Native Americans, come to Montreal hoping to resolve a generation of conflict in the North American back country. Amid furious negotiations, great pomp and ceremony, and an outbreak of disease that killed one of the principal negotiators, these representatives concluded a peace treaty that marked an end to decades of armed conflict and brought together the French and the Indian nations of the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes regions.

Sitting astride one of the few entry points into the North American continent, the St. Lawrence River, the host city was the center of a trading network that linked the French who had founded the city some sixty years earlier with Indians further west. Bartering for furs with weapons, ammunition, other manufactured goods, and brandy, voyageurs from Montreal linked the markets of Montreal and Europe to the Native Americans of the interior. They were joined by missionaries who tried to convert the Indians to Catholicism, and by French authorities who concluded alliances with peoples in the Great Lakes region (the pays d’en haut) and beyond. These alliances recognized the French as a paternal provider and mediator, called Onontio by the Algonquians. While the French would not have accorded their allies the same sovereign status they gave themselves or other European nations, those Indian nations themselves were insistent on their independence from Onontio.