In 1980, the Cold War was in full bloom. The Soviet father of the hydrogen bomb and Nobel Peace Laureate turned dissident physicist, Andrei Sakharov, had been exiled to Gorki by the Soviet authorities. Called "senile" and under heavy Soviet censorship, Sakharov had a hard time communicating his latest scientific results to readers outside of Gorki. Some smuggled results reached the author, Harry Lipkin, who then realized that he and Sakharov were both pioneers in a new revolution on our understanding the structure of matter. The particle physics community had resisted their revelation that the accepted building blocks of matter, neutrons and protons, were composed of tinier building blocks called "quarks". What followed was a remarkable adventure in which both scientists fought the Soviet censors, smuggling postcards and manuscripts into and out of the Soviet Union while trying to further scientific progress.Against a backdrop of politics, suppression, and genius, Andrei Sakharov, Quarks and the Structure of Matter details the search for the basic building blocks of matter, the path to understanding the forces that bind them together, and how scientific knowledge is learned, communicated and passed from one group of investigators to another.

According to the author of this concise, high-level study, physicists often shy away from group theory, perhaps because they are unsure of which parts of the subject belong to the physicist and which belong to the mathematician. However, it is possible for physicists to understand and use many techniques which have a group theoretical basis without necessarily understanding all of group theory. This book is designed to familiarize physicists with those techniques. Specifically, the author aims to show how the well-known methods of angular momentum algebra can be extended to treat other Lie groups, with examples illustrating the application of the method. Chapter headings include such topics as isospin, the group SU3 and its application to elementary particles, the three-dimensional harmonic oscillator, algebras of operators which change the number of particles; permutations, bookkeeping and Young diagrams; the groups SU4, SU6 and SU12, an introduction to groups of higher rank, and more. Unabridged republication of the second edition of Lie Groups for Pedestrians, published by North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1966. Prefaces. Appendices. Bibliography. Subject Index.