Move over Sir Isaac Newton and make way for quarks and leptons.

A theory that has been part of the physics canon for more than 30 years is now making its way into New York state's high school science classrooms. But before they can introduce their students to the new material, high school teachers across the state must get a grasp on it themselves – with help from Cornell University.

In the spring of 2001, as part of statewide public school reforms in math, science and technology education, New York state introduced a new core curriculum and a standardized Regents examination in physics. While the curriculum still includes plenty of classical Newtonian physics, like the laws of motion and gravity, it also includes the Standard Model: a difficult theory about the fundamental particles in nature and how they interact.

"It's quite possible that even if they were physics majors, teachers may have never seen it before," says Ahren Sadoff, research professor at Cornell's Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics (LEPP). "Odds are that the vast majority of high school physics teachers probably don't know much about it."

To bridge this knowledge gap, particle physicists and space scientists at Cornell are working with New York state physics teachers to develop laboratory exercises and other curriculum materials on the Standard Model. Recently high school physics teachers convened at Cornell for a workshop in which teachers spent a week developing laboratory exercises for their students on the Standard Model as well as on planetary science and the concept of scale. Cornell physicists and graduate students were on hand to advise the teachers on making the abstract realm of particle physics accessible.

"What I heard from teachers was that they were very ill-prepared to teach the Standard Model," said Lora Hine, educational outreach coordinator for LEPP and an organizer of the workshop. "There's really a lack of materials provided by the state for teaching the Standard Model."Materials developed in the workshop will be made available to teachers across the state via the Web.

The body of theory known as the Standard Model, which emerged in its current form in the early 1970s, is a combination of two major developments in particle physics. The first was the theory that protons and neutrons, the subatomic particles once thought to be the basic units of the atom's nucleus, are themselves composed of still more fundamental particles, known as quarks. Another basic unit of matter, it's now believed, is the lepton, a point-like particle with no internal structure, the best-known example being the electron. The second major component of the Standard Model is the unification of three of the four fundamental forces in nature into a single, seamless piece of theory: Two of the forces, the electromagnetic force, which accounts for electrical, chemical and magnetic interactions, and the weak force, which governs the interactions between leptons, are now combined in the electroweak theory. This, in turn, is unified in the Standard Model with the effects of the strong force that binds quarks together. Attempts to unify the theory with gravity, the weakest of the four fundamental forces, have so far been unsuccessful.

In volume, the Standard Model makes up a very small portion of the overall Regents physics curriculum. Indeed, the only reference to it in the 38-page physics core curriculum guide published by the New York State Department of Education is a single "performance indicator," representing just a few of many concepts that high school students taking the state's Regents exam in physics are expected to understand.

Even so, the inclusion of the Standard Model in the mandated core curriculum is a significant upgrade, bringing the concepts taught in New York state classrooms far closer to the physics currently being taught, researched and debated in universities.

"If you take out the Standard Model, then you're mostly teaching stuff that's about 300 years old. If you check out newspapers and magazines – and some kids do read those things – you see that a lot of the articles that relate to physics are dealing with particle physics," said Andrew Telesca, a physics teacher at Johnson City High School and a contributor to the core curriculum. "We needed something that was going to bring physics teaching in high schools into the 21st century."

"I seldom get an opportunity to work with anybody who does what I do," said Michael Mangini, a teacher at Dryden Central Schools and a participant in the recent Cornell workshop. "Most schools aren't big enough to have two or three physics teachers. An opportunity to be with colleagues who have similar problems and similar ideas – that's really hard to turn down."

This article was prepared by Cornell News Service science intern Lissa Harris