1. Steven Weinberg, “Conceptual Foundations of the Unified Theory of Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions,” Reviews of Modern Physics 52 (1980), 515–23.
2. My use of “collective” resonates with the definition given by Fleck of a “thought collective” as “a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interactions, [in which] we will find by implication that it also provides the special ‘carrier’ for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated thought style.” Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 39. I would translate “thought style” as style of reasoning as expounded in Silvan S. Schweber, “Hacking the Quantum Revolution,” European Journal of Physics H 40 (2015), 53–149. See also the informative and perceptive Introduction by Ilana Löwy, Nathalie Jas, and Johannes Fehr, “De l’originalité et de la richesse de la pensée de Ludwik Fleck,” in Penser aver Fleck: Investigating a Life Studying Life Sciences, ed. Johaness Fehr, Nathalie Jas, and Ilana Löwy (Zurich: Collegium Helveticum, 2009).
3. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, as estimated by attendance at the Rochester conferences, the size of the theoretical high energy physics community worldwide was over 350.
4. Chen Ning Yang, “Symmetry and Physics,” in The Oskar Klein Memorial Lectures, vol. 1, Lectures by C. N. Yang and S. Weinberg, ed. G. Ekspong (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 1991), 27; Chen Ning Yang, “My Experience as Student and Researcher,” International Journal of Modern Physics A 27(9) (2012), 1230009-1–19, on 13.
5. There is by now a huge literature on the standard model at the level of Scientific American articles. For an accessible introduction to the subject together with an insightful historical overview see Gerard ’t Hooft, “Gauge Theory of the Forces between Elementary Particles,” Scientific American 242 (June 1980), 104–36; Under the Spell of the Gauge Principle (Singapore: World Scientific, 1994); In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).