In 1978 a team of twenty physicists performed an experiment at SLAC that demonstrated convincingly that the weak and electromagnetic forces were acting together in a fundamental process, the inelastic scattering of polarized electrons. This result showed that the electron was a normal partner in the model of electroweak interactions as first spelled out by Steven Weinberg in 1967.

The work I describe here was done mostly by other persons as part of a team effort. In this paper I have tried to give credit to the many excellent contributions from this group. I had hoped to point out all of the important individual efforts that were so critical to the overall success, but I feel that this summary falls short of that goal. This chapter should be taken as a personal recollection of the work that occurred over a period of eight years at SLAC, Yale University, and elsewhere.

As a part of this chapter, the organizers asked that I summarize the work in atomic physics to seek out parity-violating effects in atomic levels. I reluctantly agreed to attempt this, even though I had no involvement in those experiments. What I present here is only a brief history of the search for optical rotation by bismuth vapor, as reported in the literature. I have not attempted to extend this summary to cover the work on the other atoms – thallium, lead, and cesium – which came somewhat later.