Because this is a right-wing physics blog, it is necessary to inform you about the saddening news - news I heard from Ari Pakman yesterday - that Yuval Ne'eman (*1925), an eminent Israeli physicist and right-wing politician, died yesterday.
If you're interested, you can read the article about him on
Wikipedia and
Peter Woit's blog, much like the text of
Yisrael Medad, Ne'eman's political advisor. News summarized by Google are
here. In 1961, Ne'eman published a paper with a visionary title
- Derivation of strong interactions from a gauge invariance
As far as I understand, the symmetry he was talking about was the flavor symmetry which is not really a gauge symmetry.
Ne'eman co-authored the book "
The Eightfold Way" with Murray Gell-Mann, contributed tremendously to the development of nuclear and subnuclear physics in Israel (which includes the nuclear weapons), and was the president of Tel Aviv University, among many other organizations.
And of course, he has studied QCD, supersymmetry, superstrings, and other things. One month ago, a book with his selected research was released:
