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The ten-year hiatus has profoundly affected our generation, and even further. The theory of the layer submodel, which has been shelved for a decade, is internationally uncompetitive.
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As we all know, atoms are made up of nuclei and electrons, and atomic nuclei are made up of protons and neutrons. So, are protons, neutrons, and electrons elementary particles? As far as we know, electrons are elementary particles, but protons and neutrons are not, they are both made up of "quarks", and quarks are elementary particles. A proton consists of two upper quarks and a lower quark, and a neutron consists of two lower quarks and an upper quark. The upper quark band is +2/3 basic charge and the lower quark band is -1/3 basic charge, so the charge of the proton is +1 basic charge, and the charge of the neutron is 0. The quark theory was proposed in the sixties by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019), for which he won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics.
However, I have long heard that Chinese scholars have proposed a similar model called "layer", and I have heard that Professor Liu Yaoyang of HKUST has made important contributions to the layer model, but unfortunately it did not go deeper because of the Cultural Revolution. How far has the layer submodel gone? Without the Cultural Revolution, how much could Chinese scholars have achieved? This is something I've always been curious about.
Recently, I saw an article in the journal Modern Physics Knowledge, "Layer Model in My Memory", written by Huang Tao, a researcher at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This article answers my doubts, and a few excerpts are as follows:
Zhu Hongyuan first started from the physical image of hadrons having internal structures, and innovatively proposed that hadrons are bound states composed of hadrons (called layers only in June 1966) that are the basic components of the next level of physical reality. From 1965 to 1966, on the basis of joint cooperation and research, the Beijing Elementary Particle Theory Group was formed, with a total of 39 people, published 3 collections of papers, a total of 42 papers, and established the theory of elementary particle layer submodels.
As we all know, scientific papers can only be recorded if they are published, and even the date of publication is very important. However, after 1949, it was never allowed to send articles to foreign journals for publication, and the papers had to be published in domestic academic journals, otherwise it would be a big rebellion. What is even more incredible is that after the start of the Cultural Revolution, in order to break the old and establish a new revolutionary ideal, all domestic academic journals were suspended one after another, and many papers written had nowhere to be submitted for publication. Everyone tried their best to find publications and report them to their superiors. Qian Sanqiang (then vice minister of the Second Ministry of Machinery Industry and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) also came to the Zhongguancun Atomic Energy Institute to listen to the report, encouraging us to strive to make good results and promise to solve the problem of journal publication. Fortunately, with the care and intervention of Qian Sanqiang and Zhou Peiyuan (vice president of Peking University), two old seniors and veteran leaders, these 42 papers were published in the Atomic Energy Magazine, No. 3 and No. 7-8, 1966, and the Journal of Peking University, No. 2, 1966, which was under the supervision of the Second Ministry of Machinery Industry (these two journals were still on the eve of suspension). Under the conditions at that time, individual signatures were not encouraged, and most articles were published by collective signatures, with the contributor indicated in the footnotes.
At that time, these research results were ahead of the international non-relativistic quark model, about 1 to 2 years earlier than the international equivalent relativistic quark model. Unfortunately, our articles are published in Chinese very common and soon-to-be-discontinued journals in China, and the international academic community cannot understand and cite these results. After the 1966 summer symposium, the results of the layer submodel may have been introduced abroad by Salaam and Japanese scientists attending the conference, so much so that the internationally renowned scientist Steven Weinberg (1933-2021) later said: "A group of theoretical physicists in Beijing has long insisted on a type of quark theory, but called it a layer, not a quark, because these particles represent a deeper level of reality than ordinary hadrons" (see Weinberg's Book The First Three Minutes").
Soon after the layer sub-model achieved systematic results, due to the Cultural Revolution forced to stop, scientific researchers were sent to the countryside and army farms to transform the idea, and none of them were spared. It is conceivable that without this ten-year interruption, we, the graduate students and young scientists who are just starting out in scientific research, are in a period of innovative ability, and are likely to make some important contributions on the basis of the layer sub-model. For example, in the process of layer submodel research, there have been spin and statistical difficulties, in 1966, Liu Yaoyang's article of the University of Science and Technology of China tried to solve it with three sets of quark schemes, if you insist on exploring and selecting the symmetry group, it is entirely possible to put forward the concept of color freedom (internationally proposed in 1972, quantum chromodynamics) concept. However, there is no "if" on the road of scientific research, and sometimes whoever breaks the window paper first may be a major breakthrough, and it is useless for others to talk about "if". The ten-year hiatus has profoundly affected our generation, and even further. In the early 1970s, I woke up to the rapid development of particle physics theory in the world, from the quark model more than 10 years ago to the Standard Model theory of dynamics...
The Cultural Revolution forced particle physics research to stall at the level of the virtuoso model of 10 years ago, and the theory of the layer submodel, which had been shelved for a decade, was internationally uncompetitive. In August 1978, the mainland sent a delegation headed by Zhu Hongyuan to participate in the 19th International Conference on High Energy Physics held in Tokyo, Japan for the first time, and began and gradually expanded international academic exchanges, realizing that there was a big gap between the development of particle physics in China and the level of international developed countries. We can only work hard and catch up.