The Matter of Everything - Suzie Sheehy ****

It's notable how many of the superstar physicists from Newton and Einstein through to Feynman have been theoreticians. Experimental physicists - utterly essential, apart from anything else to temper the imaginations of the theoreticians (which is probably why there are so many wild theories in cosmology) - rarely penetrate the popular imagination. Because Suzie Sheehy is covering the development of experimental particle physics here, she doesn't include arguably the greatest experimental physicist of all time, Michael Faraday - but as well as, for example, Rutherford and Thomson, there are plenty of names here that will be unfamiliar, making this an important book in uncovering the practical difficulties that particularly the early experimenters faced.

Starting with the discoveries of X-rays and the electron using cathode ray tubes, we are taken through Rutherford's evidence for the atomic nucleus, cloud chambers and cosmic rays, particle accelerators, neutrinos, quarks and the Higgs boson (though that gets relatively short coverage, perhaps because it's difficult to talk about individual experimenters). At each stage, Sheehy finishes the look at a particular topic by uncovering applications. Some of these seem a bit like the painful attempts to justify NASA spending on a handful of spinoffs - surely better simply to go for science for science's sake - though there are possibly a few surprises, such as the use of cosmic rays to get information on the innards of objects too big and/or dense to use X-rays. 

It's wonderful to see the work of experimenters properly celebrated and described. On the whole, Sheehy does this at a sufficiently high level that the non-technical reader can easily follow. It helps that the more esoteric aspects of theoretical physics only get mentioned in so much as they're necessary to explain what the experiments are intended to achieve, while the big name twentieth century theoreticians, such as Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac, flit through like ghosts with little more than passing mentions.

The only real issue here is that Rutherford's infamous (but arguably accurate at the time) comment that all science is either physics or stamp collecting probably should have been 'either theoretical physics or stamp collecting'. Experimental physics is about gathering facts (and building the equipment to gather those facts), or more recently producing statistics. While the practicalities are initially fascinating, particularly in the string and sealing wax era, by the time we get onto later particle accelerators, the technology starts to lack distinction, while the huge groups involved mean that the story loses the personal touch that makes popular science easier to relate to. It's not disastrous, but the second half of the book is less interesting than the first.

There are also one or two historical inaccuracies. J. J. Thomson is described as founding director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where that role fell to the arguably much greater physicist James Clerk Maxwell. We are also told that Harriet Brooks was the first woman to study at the Cavendish laboratory in 1902. In fact, though change was painfully slow, the first women studied there in 1878. 

However, these are minor issues - the book is a useful reminder of how the experimental side of physics has been underplayed in popular science and arguably undervalued in the wider field - it would be great if Sheehy could follow up with a similar look at other aspects of experimental physics.

A quick postscript on the cover - I usually show the UK version of a book here, but for this book I was first contacted by the US publisher, hence this being the US cover.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here