For years, physicists have sought for and found unified theories.

1861-1865
James Maxwell, in a series of pages, described the interrelation of electric and magnetic fields thereby unifying them into electromagnetism. This led to the now-famous Maxwell's Equations.

1881-1884
Hertz demonstrated radio waves and established that radio waves and light are electromagnetic waves of different frequencies, as predicted by Maxwell's theory.
1967-1970
Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg proposed a theory that unifies electromagnetic and weak interactions.

They predicted the mass of the W boson which mediates weak processes such as beta decay and predicted a new type of weak interaction and its mediating particle the Z boson. Evidence for this new type of process was soon found. They also predicted the Higgs Boson.

1979
The Nobel Prize was awarded to Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg for their role in the development of the electroweak theory, four years before the discovery of the W and Z bosons!

1983
The W and Z bosons were finally discovered in 1983 by the UA-1 and UA-2 experiments at CERN. These discoveries dramatically confirmed the Standard Model. Detectors at today's accelerators have observed over 100,000 W's and millions of Z's.