Skip to main content

Who Cares About Particle Physics? - Pauline Gagnon ****

This could be a very short book, consisting only of the words 'I do' - but a more realistic title would be 'What has the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ever done for us?' Pauline Gagnon takes us on a tour of the standard model of particle physics, introduces the clumsily-titled Brout-Englert-Higgs field (most of us give in and accept it is more practically called the Higgs field, while recognising the other contributors), investigates the role of particle accelerators and takes us through the success with the Higgs boson, and the less successful search for dark matter and supersymmetrical particles.

 The later part of the book is a bit of hotchpotch of the author's pet topics (or at least I'm guessing this, as they don't really flow from the first six or seven chapters) on the likes of a rather meandering collection of what research does for us from cancer cures to nuclear fusion (eventually), an examination of the management model used at CERN, a discussion of the (lack of) diversity in physics and bizarrely the role of Mileva Maric in Einstein's work, before reverting to topic of the book with a final chapter looking at possible future discoveries at CERN.

 What makes this book worth celebrating for me is getting a really good feel for what the scientists working at the LHC actually do, how they interpret those messy-looking blasts of data, how so many scientists can work together (perhaps ascribing rather more efficiency to the process than is strictly accurate) and why this kind of research is valuable. This kept me interested and wanting to discover more.

I am giving this book four stars for its interesting insider content and particularly its insight into the way that the LHC is used that I have never seen elsewhere. But it does have some issues. Gagnon's attempt to speak down to the general reader sometimes feels a little condescending, not least in the decision to use stuffed toys to represent fundamental particles - it feels like she's trying too hard. There's also a classic 'expert's issue' in explaining why the particle discovered was thought to be a Higgs boson. She explains how the standard model was flawed and patched up with the idea of the Higgs etc. field. This implied there should be Higgs bosons, but they didn't know the mass. So how do they know that the new particle is a Higgs boson, rather than just something else that was missing from the standard model? There is no convincing answer given for this.

 The writing style was also a little too much like being lectured - a barrage of facts, lacking much in the way of narrative structure. And an oddly obvious error had crept in: a table showing the behaviour of dark matter claimed it was not influenced by gravity, which is rather odd since this is the only way it can be detected. Oh, and the author falls into the error of trying to justify the expenditure on CERN because it gave us the web - a particularly lame argument.

 However, these negatives are more than overcome by the content in the sense that we get far more than the typical basic tour and explanation of the LHC - this is really insightful material on how the LHC experiments are used and how they might be extended in the search for dark matter and the (increasingly unlikely) supersymmetric particles. Because of this, it's a book that's well worth reading if you have interest in this most fundamental of physical explorations.
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