Dirac's Dream: The Quest For The Magnetic Monopole

Dirac's Dream tells the story of the quest for the magnetic monopole, the long lost brother of the electron, in Maxwell's four famous equations. The existence of the magnetic monopole, first suggested by the curious asymmetry of Maxwell's equations from over 150 years ago, if confirmed would mark a revolutionary paradigm shift in our understanding of the universe, resounding across the entire field of physics, from electromagnetic theory to cosmology.This scientific quest has involved, directly or indirectly, some of the greatest minds of physics: Maxwell, Thomson*, Poincare, Heaviside, Curie*, Dirac*, Jordan, Schwinger*, Polyakov, 't Hooft*, Gross*, Sorkin, Wu, Yang* and Cho (* denotes recipient of a Nobel Prize). Kicked off by Dirac's groundbreaking work, monopoles have been sought at each new accelerator as the high-energy frontier is pushed to greater and greater energies. This book is ideal reading for anyone - from professional researchers to the interested layperson - wishing to understand the historical search for the magnetic monopole in the context of contemporary physics developments and research efforts.