Skip to main content

The Particle at the End of the Universe – Sean Carroll ****

The possible discovery of the Higgs boson has prompted a flurry of books – in part because it’s significant (and because the Large Hadron Collider is a sexy bit of kit) and in part because the whole business of the Higgs field and its importance for the mass of particles is one of the most obscure and unlikely bits of physics in the current canon.
I have really mixed feelings about this entry in the genre from physicist Sean Carroll. It’s not because his book is too difficult to understand – it’s almost because it’s too easy. Generally speaking, there are three levels of good popular science. There’s TV news popular science, which cuts a lot of corners to make things totally simplistic, but manages to get the message across quickly. There’s the kind of book a good popular science writer will produce – highly approachable and readable, giving a lot more depth than the TV news and the best way to actually get an understanding of what’s going on for most of us, but still cutting some scientific corners. And there’s the kind of book a good scientist will write, which will probably go over your head the first time you read it, but if you persevere will give you the best illusion of knowing what the real science is about and getting some feel for the world of the scientist.
In his previous book From Eternity to Here, like Cox & Forshaw’s Why Does E=mc2, Carroll didn’t pull the punches. Much of the text was readable, but it may well have taken several attempts to get it to sink in. It was the perfect popular science book by an academic. Parts of this one, unfortunately verge on TV science. Some of it is so fluffy and approachable that it almost disappears into meaninglessness.
Luckily, this isn’t true of all the book. The early parts are worse. Oddly, he gets significantly better when talking about the building of the Large Hadron Collider than he does in his first attempts on the physics. And it is worth persevering as Carroll improves with his approach further in (best of all are a few appendices where he goes into more detail and we see the old, mind-bending Carroll emerging).
Some specific issues I had: it was really irritating that Carroll uses units like degrees Fahrenheit and miles rather than scientific (or European) units throughout. This is real poor TV science stuff. A lot of his science is what I’d call ‘plonking’ he states it as if it is absolute truth, not the current best theory. So, for instance, he speaks of dark matter as if it were certain fact (nary a mention of the rival MOND theory). And he says at one point ‘The world is really made out of fields. Sometimes the stuff of the universe looks like particles… but deep down it’s really fields.’
I have two problems with this. One is that one of my absolute heroes was Richard Feynman and he said of light ‘I want to emphasize that light does come in this form – particles.’ If particles are good enough for Feynman, they’re good enough for me. Secondly I think that what Carroll should be saying is ‘fields are the model that work best to describe what’s out there.’ In the end it’s a human devised model of something we can only inspect extremely indirectly. It is almost bound to be wrong – it’s just better than anything else we have at doing the job. (Yet.)
Perhaps the worst problem is the way he oversimplifies. Oddly this is a classic problem when a scientist is writing popular science (and why a good science writer is usually better) because he doesn’t know what the lay reader finds puzzling, so doesn’t bother to explain. His explanation of the application of symmetry to physics simply doesn’t fill in enough of the gaps. He says, for instance, that a mentos and diet coke experiment is symmetrical in all sorts of ways – you can point it in any direction, or translate it to any position and it works the same. Clearly this isn’t true. It wouldn’t work the same if the bottle was upside down, pointing straight at the ground, nor would it be the same if you translated it under the sea or into space. It’s a classic case of handwaving generalisation, missing out all the provisos and so making the explanation fail.
It’s certainly not a bad book – but I did prefer its rivals on a couple of counts. For a better heavy duty attempt at the physics, Frank Close’s The Infinity Puzzle wins (though that definitely is a ‘several reads to get it’ book). And for the best overall description of the search for the Higgs, combined with the most approachable but informative information on the Higgs field and the whole standard model of particle physics I’d recommend Higgs by Jim Baggott. But Sean Carroll’s book still did have a lot going for it and is still well worth considering.

Paperback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur