Electroweak theory places electromagnetism and the weak nuclear interaction within a unified framework. The discussion uses beta decay to introduce the weak interaction and connects this unification to the broader search for simpler physical laws.
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29:221967 electroeak unification. >> Yeah. The the story of physics is always the story of unification. It's trying to take all of the disperate phenomenon that we see in the universe and distill it down to the fewest rules and the fewest constituent parts that we can think of. The great big unification in the late 1800s was by James Clerk Maxwell. He discovered that electricity and magnetism are the same thing, electromagnetism. And he came up with the four Maxwell's equations that define everything that has to do. The second big one is this one. Okay, this one showed that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, which is something that we thought is just
30:02related to beta decay, right? The fact that a neutron will spit out a neutrino, an electron and a posetron or a no, a proton, an electron, and an anti-utrino. And these little processes are limited to the nucleus itself. It turns out that beta decay which is governed by the weak nuclear force is the same force as electromagnetism. >> It was unified into electroeak by theoretical physicists Sheldon Glaco and Steven Weinberg at Harvard and MIT. They won the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics. >> And we are still on the journey for grand unified theory, but we are moving