Skip to main content

Higgs Force - Nicholas Mee *****

There are plenty of books about the hunt for the Higgs boson, most notably Jim Baggott's excellent Higgs, so at first sight, Higgs Force, might seem to be more of the same, but in a couple of areas it is unparalleled in anything I've read in the field.

 Where Higgs is very much the story of the hunt with a bit of physics thrown in, Higgs Force takes us on a journey through our developing understanding of the nature of the components of the universe, putting the eventual origin and significance of the Higgs field (and boson) into context.

 It's not perfect, by any means, and I was on course to give it four stars rather than five. This is because it has a tendency to concentrate on the bit of the history of science that fit the picture that is being developed, and rather skims over, or even slightly distorts, those that don’t. A good example is the description of Dirac’s relativistic equation for the electron, and his prediction of the positron. The book gives the impression that Dirac stared into the fire for an evening then came up with the whole thing, which misses out a whole lot of duplication of other people’s work and near misses. But more importantly, this book is very much focused on the importance of symmetry and suggests that Dirac’s equation predicted the positron through symmetry considerations. In fact the equation predicted negative energy electrons, which brought Dirac to his outrageously bold suggestion of the negative energy sea, which is anything but symmetrical, and then to the idea that there could be holes in the negative energy sea which could be interpreted as positrons. A very different chain of thought.

 However, the reason I eventually overlooked these foibles is that this book fills in the gaps that Higgs misses. In the review for that book I complained 'Like every other book I’ve read on the subject it falls down on making the linkage between the mathematics of symmetry and the particle physics comprehensible.' Although there a few bumpy moments (and I wish the author had given more detail on symmetry groups, which he never actually names) I would say that Nicholas Mee has achieved the impossible, and made a generally clear and (relatively) easy to follow explanation of the significance of symmetry and symmetry breaking that I'd say no one else has really managed. This is an extremely impressive feat. It leaves the description he gives of the various particle accelerators and the actual discover of the Higgs particle feeling rather flat - the book could easily lose a chunk of that, because by comparison it is mundane.

 There's one other section where this book absolutely hits the spot: in its description of Feynman diagrams. Many books cover these, and show how they represent, say, the interaction of a photon and an electron - but Higgs Force has by far the best description of Feynman diagrams I’ve ever seen in a popular science book, properly explaining the interface between the diagram and the associated calculations, which is brilliant, and again pretty well unique.

 So not a uniformly brilliant book (I also question the relevance of putting puzzles for the reader in a book like this), but where Mee does hit the spot, he achieves a remarkable ability to communicate complexity, and never more so than the fundamental aspect of symmetry and how it has shaped modern particle physics.
Hardback:  


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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more