Krishna
Hm. I wondered how topical will a book on particle physics written in 2000 would be now. In these frontier edge topics, two decades is like two centuries and I wondered if this will turn out to be something that is fully obsolete. I need not have worried. There is enough in this book to keep your interest – odd things like ‘CERN is planning a Hadron Collider to be installed in 2005; it may turn out amazing discoveries’ aside.
He talks about the world just being made of four fundamental particles – electron, photon (light particle), up quark and down quark. All others are either divisible (including atom, the name of which was derived from the Greek word for indivisible) or unstable (muons etc). There are gluons which bind the up and down quarks together and their proportion determines whether this becomes a proton or a neutro n (rather like atoms themselves are determined by the number of protons, neutrons and electrons determine the atom and therefore the element).
He also explains the concepts like ‘colour’ which is applied to quarks. The phrase is based on a concept comprehensible to humans to explain a quantum phenomenon. Very interesting.
He goes back into the fundamental particles predicted by theory and the ‘families’ they belong to. All of them finally break down to those two mentioned above but as the theory evolved, they met a lot of what seemed to be elementary particles along the way.
He describes how particle accelerators work – I have never seen this description anywhere – ‘If you take e = mc squared, this explains how energy is created from particles by fission reaction. The accelerators do the reverse. They collide high energy beams against each other and convert part of the energy into mass (subatomic particles)’. Brilliant.
He also explains the Higgs Boson. This was ‘artificially created’ in the Standard Theory. The Standard Theory explained everything in quantum world successfully except the mass of the particles (eg W and Z particles, which have mass, as opposed to electrons, photons etc which have no mass). But scientists were always uncomfortable with the idea as this was a ‘bolt on’ and (until the nineties when this book was written) there was no direct lab evidence of the existence of this particle. (Incidentally, as Higgs is the one ‘that creates matter with mass’ it was dubbed the God Particle. ). Later, the Supersymmetry Theory, which is an extension of the Standard Model was postulated and that predicts the Higgs Boson in itself. The problem with that theory? It has not been independently validated in the lab (again, until the nineties)
It amazes you to see that the weak magnetic force, the strong magnetic force and the electromagnetic force – three of the four basic forces, the fourth one being gravity – behave the same in extremely small distances (mathematically so, as these are not yet observable in any known lab) and so the conviction that there has to be a Theory of Everything is stronger.
The way it explains both Dark Matter and Dark Energy is fascinating and makes your understanding of these expand. (At least it did mine). The ongoing areas of research are laid out for you to understand.
All in all a welcome addition to the books that make high science accessible to the laymen.
7/10
– – Krishna (July 2019)