Past lessons and future importance of polarization

Polarization and spin effects have traditionally brought surprises to physicists particularly to those who thought that such effects were unimportant. In hadron physics, large unexplained effects keep turning up and are still unresolved puzzles. A good measurement of the uninteresting beta ray polarization could have discovered parity nonconservation many years before its prediction by Lee and Yang. Nobody knows whether there are further exciting discoveries of this kind waiting for polarization experiments