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

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...

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...

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). ...