Finally, Frank Wilczek's and David Gross's Nobel lectures are available as streaming video:
http://nobelprize.org/ ... (Gross)
http://nobelprize.org/ ... (Wilczek)
Gross was the first one I have watched. I highly recommend you to look at it! David explained how amazing their discovery was in the context of the 1960s.
It was a period of experimental supermacy and theoretical impotence. The experimentalists were making progress all the time while the theoreticians had no clue how to explain the obscure data about strongly interacting physics. Freeman Dyson declared in 1960:
- The right theory of the strong force won't be found in the next 100 years.
Well, Dyson was only wrong by 87 years, Gross explains. He then sketches the renormalization, screening, anti-screening, quarks, Bjorken scaling, the competition between the S-matrix theory and field theory, the sum rules, the Landau pole and the Soviet claims that field theory was doomed, the pragmatic (calculational) character of American physicists, how quarks suddenly looked real, how the scaling suggested that there can be no interactions, how it seemed that interactions are always stronger at short distances, how they proved it with Coleman for spin below 1 theories, how QCD is beautiful, UV complete, and free of dimensionless parameters, how the asymptotic freedom improves gauge coupling unification, which is also helped by supersymmetry that many of us expect at the LHC, and so forth.
I've also listened to Frank Wilczek's talk - it is complementary in various respects - but someone else should describe it instead of me.
