field at the time. Weinberg too was thinking about the possible application of ideas of symmetry breaking to understanding nuclear masses, based on Nambu's work, and like Higgs, Weinberg was quite disappointed by Goldstone's result that massless particles would always accompany such physics. So Wein

make up atomic nuclei—protons and neutrons—fit within the particle zoo and the jungle of interactions associated with their production and decay. Nambu, like others, was struck by the almost identical masses of the proton and the neutron. It seemed to him, as it had to Yang and Mills, that some und

) Following Higgs's stint at the summer school in 1960, he began to study the literature on symmetry and symmetry breaking, examin- ing the work of Nambu, Goldstone, Salam, Weinberg, and Anderson. Higgs became depressed by the seemingly hopeless task of reconciling Goldstone's theorem with the possib

s. The beautiful mathematical aspects of supersymmetry encouraged, in 2984, the resurrection of an idea that had been dormant since the 196os when Nambu and others tried to understand the strong force as if it were a theory of quarks connected by stringlike excitations. When supersym- metry was incor