Concluding remarks

Abstract

I shall not attempt to sum up the conclusions of the day’s discussion, because what conclusions we have come to (and quite a number of points have come out clearly) are rather involved and technical, and I should not at this time go into details; on many major points we have not reached any definite conclusions. There remains much more interesting work to be done; but I should like to comment on a few facts that have come out: In the first place, one is impressed by the amount of information which has been produced in the course of a year. Most of the problems which we have discussed during the day did not exist even as questions one year ago, and it is quite impressive what has been done in this time. We should not complain that all the answers are not available today. Of course, the existence of parity violation is now established beyond any doubt, and an extremely simple feature seems to emerge, though still subject to exact confirmation, in the behaviour of the polarizations, which seems to select fairly heavily between the possible interactions. On the other hand, we have no clear picture yet of the recoil data which might be capable of tying down the possible interactions very closely, or alternatively of showing us that there is something basically wrong with the whole present approach. We should not discount that possibility at the present stage.