Skip to main content

Collider – Paul Halpern ****

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is set to give us deep insights into the nature of matter and the origins of the universe. It could provide evidence of extra dimensions, and give us an idea of whether string theorists are on the right track. This is fascinating stuff, and it is what Paul Halpern aims to explain in Collider, after first giving us a history of high energy physics and particle accelerators.
I wasn’t very optimistic about the book at first. It jumps straight into the Higgs mechanism and spontaneous symmetry breaking without explaining these concepts in much detail for the layperson. I was a little worried the book was going to turn out to be over-technical, and only fully understandable to those with a physics degree. Luckily, this wasn’t the case at all, and when the book gets on to talking about the LHC in detail, and how it works and what it will be looking for, the concepts are fleshed out clearly and simply. In fact, Halpern has a knack of explaining tricky ideas well for the general reader in the minimum of words. Where something isn’t entirely clear, the book still leaves the reader with a fairly good grasp of what’s being discussed.
Overall, the science of the LHC is covered quite well, and there’s an entertaining section on ‘Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider’, a group concerned about world destroying scenarios at CERN, in which Halpern explains why there’s nothing to worry about. The most readable parts of the book, however, are in the middle, where it covers earlier high energy research and the people involved.
The best chapter is on the first particle accelerators, and contains a significant amount of biographical information about Ernest Rutherford, Ernest Walton, John Cockcroft, Ernest Lawrence, and Rolf Wideroe, someone I knew little about beforehand. Wideroe was a Norwegian engineer whose research provided a lot of the impetus for Rutherford’s team at the Canvendish Laboratory in Cambridge to build the linear accelerator they used to split the nucleus of lithium. He also inspired Lawrence to build the first cyclotron, a circular accelerator. Another highlight, which again shows the book is rather better on history and surrounding issues, is the account of what happened to the Superconducting Super Collider, intended for Texas but eventually never completed. The section contains a number of lessons to be borne in mind when future, similar projects are planned.
There’s one small point. The book costs £19.00 in the shops, which I think is a bit much; £15.00 would be more appropriate. Overall, though, this is an interesting book, great for anyone wanting to know what could happen at the LHC over the coming years and the context in which the project has been developed. This is definitely a solid four star book, and I got a lot from it.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Matt Chorley

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...