Nobel Lecture: From weak interactions to gravitation

This lecture is about my contribution to the proof of renormalizability of gauge theories. There is of course no perfectly clear separation between my contributions and those of my co-laureate ’t Hooft, but I will limit myself to some brief comments on those publications that carry only his name. An extensive review on the subject including more detailed references to contemporary work can be found elsewhere (Veltman, 1992a). As is well known, the work on the renormalizability of gauge theories caused a complete change of the landscape of particle physics. The work brought certain models to the foreground; neutral currents as required by those models were established and the discovery of the J/C was quickly interpreted as the discovery of charm, part of those models as well. More precisely, we refer here to the model of Glashow (1961), the extension to include quarks by Glashow, Iliopoulos, and Maiani (GIM; 1970) and the model of Weinberg and Salam (Weinberg, 1967; Salam, 1968) for leptons including a Higgs sector. The GIM paper contained discussions on the required neutral hadron currents and also the inclusion of charm as suggested first by Hara (1964). After an analysis by Bardeen, at a seminar in Orsay (see also Bardeen, 1969), the work of Bouchiat, Iliopoulos, and Meyer (1972) established the vanishing of anomalies for three color quarks. Without going into details, subsequently quantum chromodynamics came to be accepted. In this way the Standard Model was established in just a few years.