The Particle at the End of the Universe

The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World by Sean Carroll won the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.

 Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: the Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event.

As an aside, understanding the physics of the Higgs Boson is no mean feat.

Consider Wikipedia’s explanation: In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson with no spin, electric charge, or color charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. It is a quantum excitation of one of the four components of the Higgs field. The latter constitutes a scalar field, with two neutral and two electrically charged components, and forms a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry. The field has a "Mexican hat" shaped potential with nonzero strength everywhere (including otherwise empty space) which in its vacuum state breaks the weak isospin symmetry of the electroweak interaction. When this happens, three components of the Higgs field are "absorbed" by the SU(2) and U(1) gauge bosons (the "Higgs mechanism") to become the longitudinal components of the now-massive W and Z bosons of the weak force. The remaining electrically neutral component separately couples to other particles known as fermions (via Yukawa couplings), causing these to acquire mass as well. Some versions of the theory predict more than one kind of Higgs fields and bosons.

Yes I know what you’re thinking…

And more than once the reader of this book is comes across sections which might as well be read as a part of an advanced physics curriculum.  Carroll writes, "Whenever we have symmetry that allows us to do independent transformations at different points (a gauge symmetry), it automatically comes with a connection field that lets us compare what is going on at those locations,"

But here is the difference, not only does Carroll acknowledge the complexity of the science, he goes to great lengths to pace his book carefully as well as taking, were possible, a light natured story telling style. This includes trivialities and frivolities that are not short in supply when you consider there are 6000 scientists and technicians who work on the world’s largest particle accelerator, The Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The Particle at the End of the Universe not only explains the importance of the Higgs boson but also the Large Hadron Collider project itself; A project sure to lead some to win the Nobel Prize.

Carroll explains the importance of the LHC - learn that sub-atomic particles come in two varieties: fermions that make up matter, and bosons that carry forces. The latter include gluons, photons, gravitons and of course the Higgs. The former, the fermions, include leptons such as the electron and quarks of which there are six types: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. On top of that we have issues of symmetry, force fields and wave functions.

However, the over ambitious attempt to write the definitive account of the laws of nature for the layman there are great chunks of text which are not only demanding but may leave us with the impression that such an account is simply not feasible.

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