In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdo...

This is a second edition of a scientific biography of the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, first published in 1999. This edition adds in the remaining 20 years of Gell-Mann's life. Like most scientists, his contributions may not have been as outstanding in his later years, but it gives the complete picture - and he certainly continued to be interesting as a person. George Johnson (who clearly like a touch of scientific beauty, having previously written The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments ) does a good job of taking us into both the world and work of Gell-Mann. Not a household name, but one of the greats of twentieth century physics. Part of the problem, compared with the science that came before - even most of Einstein's - was that, as Johnson puts it, Gell-Mann's 'discoveries were not of things but of patterns - mathematical symmetries that seemed to reflect, in some ultimately mysterious way, the manner in which subatomic particles behaved.' Unlike most biograp...

The popular science market is reasonably well served with books on the neutrino. Frank Close's Neutrino is still the best on the basics despite being over ten years old, while Leonard Cole's Chasing the Ghost  gives interesting insights to the work of Cowan and Reines who first detected it. But Ghost Particle does provide enough that new and different to make it a worthy addition to the field. Alan Chodos and James Riordan give us a good description of why the neutrino was first needed by particle physics and significantly later discovered. They take us through the unlikely attempts at detection and the puzzle over why the Sun appeared to have around a third of the neutrinos that theory predicted it would have in its output, including some interesting material on alternative theories as to why this was the case. There's good coverage of the brief explosion of interest when it was thought neutrinos were detected travelling faster than light and a look at neutrino applicat...

At first glance this book has all the hallmarks of an attempt to tie quantum woo into ancient philosophical and religious beliefs, where some vague resemblance between an ancient observation about, say, 'the oneness of everything' and some aspect of quantum physics is given as evidence of the great wisdom of the ancients. In practice, if you make vague enough statements they can be said to prefigure anything - and have no connection to modern science. Thankfully, though, that's not what much of Heinrich Päs's book is about. What Päs sets out to show is that the reason that quantum physics can seem strange, if not downright weird, is that we are looking at things from the wrong direction. Quantum physics is hugely successful at practical stuff - predicting what will happen to enable successful design of, for example, electronics, but doesn't have a big picture: there is no satisfactory explanation of what's going on 'under the hood'. Päs suggests this is ...

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 ghost in question is that fascinating particle, the neutrino - almost undetectable particles that were predicted to exist in the 1930s but not discovered for over 20 years. And Leonard Cole is well placed to document the neutrino's discovery as he is the younger cousin of Fred Reines, one of the pair who delivered clear evidence of the neutrino's existence in 1956. The particle itself has been well-documented in Frank Close's excellent book Neutrino , however Cole is able to give us far more detail on one of the lesser known of the twentieth century's great physicists. I hadn't realised the quite shocking reality that Reines was only awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995 (long after his coworker, Clyde Cowan had died). It's not just the near-40 year wait, but the real surprise is that other physicists were awarded a Nobel earlier for discovering a second type of neutrino. I don't therefore begrudge Cole's labelling Reines a Nobel Prize winner in his subti...

There are plenty of books out there on the Higgs boson and its discovery. [Ed.: We recommend Higgs by Jim Baggott.] This book does something entirely different - which is a good thing. The author, James Gillies, has spent his working life at CERN, first as a scientist, then as part of the communication group, which he headed up for 12 years, and now on the organisation's Strategic Planning and Analysis unit. As such, he is unusually well placed to cover the way that CERN has come together and been run, which is the main focus of this book. What is good about this is that we get to see a lot more of just what has been involved in setting CERN up (achieving a rare level of international collaboration) and how the various pieces of kit have been constructed, leading up to the current Large Hadron Collider that was used to discover the Higgs. Sometimes the whole business was touch and go - whether it was the distinct possibility of funding falling through, or a piece...

I’m going to start this review with a longish quote from the author’s preface, for several reasons. It explains De Rújula’s purpose in writing the book, as well as the audience he’s trying to reach, while giving a taste of his idiosyncratic writing style (which he keeps up throughout the book). It’s also a good starting point for discussing the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Here’s the quote: 'This book is not intended for (very) young kids nor for physicists. It is intended for anyone – independently of the education (s)he suffered – who is interested in our basic current scientific understanding of the universe. By "universe" I mean everything observable from the largest object, the universe itself, to the smallest ones, the elementary particles that "function" as if they had no smaller parts. This is one more of many books on the subject. Why write yet another one? Because the attempts to understand our universe are indeed fun and I cannot resist the ...

One of my favourite illustrations from a science title was in Fred Hoyle's book on his quasi-steady state theory. It shows a large flock of geese all following each other, which he likened to the state of theoretical physics. In the very readable Lost in Math , physicist Sabine Hossenfelder exposes the way that in certain areas of physics, this is all too realistic a picture. (Hossenfelder gives Hoyle's cosmological theory short shrift, incidentally, though, to be fair, it wasn't given anywhere near as many opportunities to be patched up to match observations as the current version of big bang with inflation.) Lost in Math is a very powerful analysis of what has gone wrong in the way that some aspects of physics are undertaken. Until the twentieth century, scientists made observations and experiments and theoreticians looked for theories which explained them, which could then be tested against further experiments and observations. Now, particularly in p...