The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
Cover scans
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Synopsis
Details the history of physics from Thales in antiquity up to the present.
Review
The title of the book refers to the Higgs boson, a particle now (at the time of writing, September 2009) being sought by the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) particle accelerator in Geneva. The book does a good job of explaining particle physics, and it's funny, too. The book is a little out-dated in that it refers to the now-cancelled SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) accelerator. There are some very entertaining passages in the book where Leon talks physics with an imaginary Democritus (Democritus of Abdera was the first Greek to suggest that the world was made of atoms), which I immensely enjoyed.
I heartily recommend this book if you want to learn a little bit of particle physics.
Table of contents
- Preface
- Dramatis Personae
- 1 The Invisible Soccer Ball
- 2 The First Particle Physicist
- Interlude A: A Tale of Two Cities
- 3 Looking for the Atom: The Mechanics
- 4 Still Looking for the Atom: Chemists and Electricians
- 5 The Naked Atom
- Interlude B: The Dancing Moo-Shu Masters
- 6 Accelerators: They Smash Atoms, Don't They?
- Interlude C: How We Violated Parity in a Weekend ... and Discovered God
- 7 A-tom!
- 8 The God Particle at Last
- 9 Inner Space, Outer Space, and the Time Before Time
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on History and Sources
- Index