ABSTRACT
The 25th of June 1973 did not appear special. The Watergate scandal was rumbling on towards its denouement. In New York, the twin towers of the World Trade Center had opened two months previously. Nearby on Long Island, around the offices of the Physical Review, it was warm but not hot, with neither rain nor wind spoiling a pleasant summer day. The latest issue of Physical Review Letters, the prestige journal of the American Physical Society, had just gone to the printers. Among the articles in the issue that day were two on particle physics, appearing one next to the other. The articles addressed the same topic and had both arrived in the mail six or so weeks earlier. The first was by David Gross, a young 32-year-old associate professor at Princeton University, together with his first graduate student, 22-year-old Frank Wilczek. The second paper was by David Politzer, not much older at 23, who was then a graduate student at Harvard. The respective titles of the two papers were ‘Ultraviolet Behavior of Non-Abelian Gauge Theories’ and ‘Reliable Perturbative Results for Strong Interactions’. Both papers addressed the same question: how the behaviour of certain physical theories varied when examined at large distances compared to when they were examined at small distances. The papers had been received at the journal’s offices less than a week apart, and after favourable review were now appearing consecutively.
