Resumen de The stuff of legend
Magnetic monopoles' no-show has long been a bugbear to the sort of physicist that sees truth in the beauty of mathematical formulae, and among the most beautiful are the four equations collated by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s. Faced with a brute fact of nature, Maxwell eschewed beauty and wrote the freely moving monopole out of his equations--and out of history. However, monopoles made a comeback thanks to Paul Dirac, a British theorist who was notoriously word-shy and obsessed with mathematical beauty. Quantum theory was all the rage in 1931, and Dirac began applying its ideas to Maxwell's classical electromagnetism. This time, the idea stuck and 40 years on, physicists discovered that the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force that controls radioactive decay could be rolled into one, and were seeking ways to unify this force with a third, the strong nuclear force. Here, Webb examines the elusive magnetic monopole.
