In 1974, Burton Richter and Samuel Ting independently discovered the J/psi meson, Richter's team at SLAC and Ting's team at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and announced their findings back to back at the same conference. The discovery confirmed the existence of the charm quark, the second-generation counterpart to the up and down quarks, matching the muon's place as a second-generation lepton. This set off what particle physicists call the November Revolution, cementing the multigenerational quark-lepton structure of the standard model and setting off the hunt for a third generation of quarks.
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Richter and Ting shared the Nobel Prize in 1976, just two years after the discovery.
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The rushed, near-simultaneous announcements were driven partly by a race to claim credit and the Nobel Prize.
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56:26>> 1974, the discovery of the Jai Mason. >> That's right. So you know at the time we've got Yang Mills theory, we've got quantum chromodnamics, we've got this quark model, got electroeak. Um the standard model is starting to form. The standard model of particle physics. This is the killer. This is the one where everybody who was like the standard model ain't all that. >> They stopped talking. Okay. Burton Richard and Samuel Ting. They independently discovered the Jai Maison at Slack in Stanford and the Brook Haven National Laboratory um as part of MIT and they proved the existence of the charm quark which is you know we've got
57:06the up and down quirk that is the part of um protons and neutrons. This is the prediction that there is that third generation of quark that everybody's been waiting for because there's a third generation of lepttons. Yes, right with the muon that was discovered way earlier. Well, where's the one for quirs? This is where it was found. Um, very, very crucial. It ushered in the November resolution, I mean, sorry, the November revolution in particle physics because right when this was announced, it was announced at a conference because both Samuel Ting and Burton Richer were giving talks at the conference and they were back to back and they were both like, "Hey, I discovered this." The next guy's like, "Hey, I discovered the same
57:47thing that the last guy discovered." They both rushed to publish because they want that Nobel. They both got it in 1976 together and subsequently the November of that year um this multigenerational architecture of standard model meaning the first generation up down electron then the muon charm and uh strange and then we're waiting for the third one. Um it was really established and now everybody was looking for that third generation of quirks which we'll get to later in the timeline.