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qatsiBook Review: Elusive - How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass, by Frank Close
Frank Close does an excellent job here in combining Higgs' life story with his work, and although he mostly steers clear of equations, it's not for the faint-hearted on that score. Reproducing two of Higgs' papers in appendices does seem to be going a bit far and I won't pretend I understood them, but Close's more general descriptions (for example, about photons gaining mass in a superconductor) do make sense to me, at least in an "if this, then that" way. Higgs was not the only person working on these topics in the early 1960s and Close gives credit to others as well as showing what Higgs did was different and went beyond. The later part of the book describes the evolution of particle accelerators, particularly at CERN, from the 1970s onwards, to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and Higgs' eventual Nobel Prize (shared with one of those others working contemporaneously in the field, François Englert) in 2013. Higgs often went to great lengths to avoid media attention, and there is a certain irony that his theoretical papers bear his authorship alone; papers coming out of the experiments at CERN can have thousands of named authors. Close concludes with speculation about what might lie beyond our current knowledge, underlining that although the discovery of the Higgs boson may have validated the Standard Model of particle physics, it leaves so many other questions yet to be answered.
Frank Close does an excellent job here in combining Higgs' life story with his work, and although he mostly steers clear of equations, it's not for the faint-hearted on that score. Reproducing two of Higgs' papers in appendices does seem to be going a bit far and I won't pretend I understood them, but Close's more general descriptions (for example, about photons gaining mass in a superconductor) do make sense to me, at least in an "if this, then that" way. Higgs was not the only person working on these topics in the early 1960s and Close gives credit to others as well as showing what Higgs did was different and went beyond. The later part of the book describes the evolution of particle accelerators, particularly at CERN, from the 1970s onwards, to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and Higgs' eventual Nobel Prize (shared with one of those others working contemporaneously in the field, François Englert) in 2013. Higgs often went to great lengths to avoid media attention, and there is a certain irony that his theoretical papers bear his authorship alone; papers coming out of the experiments at CERN can have thousands of named authors. Close concludes with speculation about what might lie beyond our current knowledge, underlining that although the discovery of the Higgs boson may have validated the Standard Model of particle physics, it leaves so many other questions yet to be answered.