1993; 410 pages. Full Title: The
God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? New Author? : Yes. Genres : Particle Physics, Science, Molecular
Physics, Non-Fiction. Overall Rating : 8½*/10.
The Higgs boson.
Thirty years ago, its
theoretical existence was the hottest topic among (subatomic) particle physicists. It was of great importance to discover the basic building block(s) for all of Creation, and every
physicist who was searching for it hoped to win a Nobel Prize if/when they were successful. But alas, thus far, no one had yet seen the Higgs boson.
There were reasons for the
Higgs boson’s elusiveness. It’s
incredibly small, has no electric charge, no spin, emits no color, and only
exists for about 1 x 10-22 seconds.
How can you “see” a particle with those properties?
Leon Lederman was a
top-of-the-line particle physicist nerd.
He'd won the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics (along
with two other scientists) for his work in examining another
subatomic particle called a neutrino. In
1993 he wrote a book detailing the history of mankind’s search for the universe’s
fundamental building block, an endeavor which has been going on far longer than you’d
think. Lederman had his own witty name
for that oh-so-elusive speck.
He called it The God Particle.
What’s To Like...
The God Particle
is divided into a preface, nine chapters, and three (shorter) interludes. The first five chapters discuss the history
of the hunt for the basic building block, which goes all the way back to
ancient Greece, most notably a guy named Democritus (460-370
BCE) and even Thales, a
century-and-a-half earlier. Democritus
labeled the object of his quest the “a-tom”, but he mostly relied of
philosophical reasoning to formulate his conclusions. Amazingly, his suppositions have held up remarkably
well down through the centuries.
Chapters 6-9 focus on the modern-day "atom" (different from the a-tom) and its component parts: initially just the electrons, protons, and neutrons, then a plethora of even tinier particles such as leptons, positrons, gluons, muons, and last but not least,
the bosons. These latter chapters also chronicle Leon Lederman’s direct contributions to particle physics, mostly while
he was employed at, and director of, Fermilab, located just outside Chicago.
There were times, especially
in the last half of the book, when my comprehension of what I was reading
approached zero. Yet it was still enlightening, as I gained insight to how things like the measuring instruments and the particle
colliders were designed, and how you measure something that you can never
directly see, that might appear anywhere, headed in any direction, and only
around for billionths of seconds. Happily, Lederman doesn't let the text get bogged down by doing complex calculations. He presents them and references them,
but doesn’t bore you with how they were developed.
Lederman’s writing style is witty, folksy, and
anecdotal, which kept the book from becoming boring. At times, it’s even gets a bit snarky, such as when he dubs the looked-for item the titular “God
Particle”, a moniker which he says somehow managed to thoroughly ruffle the
feathers of both theists and atheists alike.
Be assured that you will learn about all sorts of things by reading The God Particle. Examples include: Galileo’s
stopwatch, the derivation of the word “boson”, how to make anti-matter,
and why that famous CERN particle accelerator over in
Switzerland, known as the “Large Hadron Collider”, has to be circular in shape, and huge, in this case more than 16 miles in circumference.
Ratings…
Amazon:
4.5/5
based on 452 ratings and 157 reviews.
Goodreads: 4.15/5 based on 3,898
ratings and 186 reviews
Excerpts...
The difference between chemists and
physicists is not really insurmountable.
I started out as a chemist but switched to physics partly because it was
easier. Since then I have frequently
noted that some of my best friends talk to chemists.
The chemists did something that the
physicists before them hadn’t done. They
did experiments relevant to atoms.
Galileo, Newton, et al., despite their considerable experimental
accomplishments, dealt with atoms on a purely theoretical basis. They weren’t lazy; they just didn’t have the
equipment. (loc. 2114)
Like many physicists, Fermi loved making up
math games. Alan Wattenberg tells of the
time he was eating lunch with a group of physicists when Fermi noted dirt on
the windows and challenged everyone to figure out how thick the dirt could get
before it would fall off the window from its own weight. Fermi helped them all get through the
exercise, which required starting from fundamental constants of nature,
applying the electromagnetic interaction, and proceeding to calculate the
dielectric attractions that keep insulators stuck to each other. At Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, a
physicist ran over a coyote one day in his car.
Fermi said it was possible to calculate the total number of coyotes in
the desert by keeping track of the vehicle-coyote interactions. These were just like particle collisions, he
said. A few rare events yielded clues
about the entire population of such particles. (loc. 5334)
Kindle Details…
The
God Particle costs $12.99 at Amazon right now. Leon Lederman has two more physics-related e-books for you at
Amazon: Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe
for $14.49, and Quantum Physics for
Poets for $12.99.
I feel like Zsa Zsa
Gabor’s seventh husband, I know what to do, but how do you make it interesting? (loc. 1448)
The quibbles are minor. There were only 14 cusswords in the whole
book (and no f-bombs), which
admittedly is pretty clean. But somehow that
seems like a lot for a non-fiction, scientific tome.
And I'm not going to sugarcoat it,
despite the author’s frequent quips, The God
Particle is a slow, difficult read.
On a complexity scale of 1-to-10, or should we say “Neil deGrasse Tyson-to-Stephen Hawking”, the
book is a lot close to the latter than the former.
Finally, there are way too
many typos, among which include linker/Tinker,
sim/sun, rime/time, subde/subtle, and gaundet/gauntlet. I suspect most of these arose during the conversion-to-digital phase. It looks like that happened in 2012, so I'll not blame Leon Lederman for the errors.
But jeez, didn’t the publishing company have its proofreaders check for
these things?
But I pick at nits. I greatly enjoyed The God Particle. It was both enlightening and entertaining, no
small accomplishment when the topic is Physics. Keep in mind though, that my degree is in
chemistry, and I am therefore inherently a science geek. If, unlike Democritus, Newton, Einstein, Hawking,
et al., you don’t care at all whether there’s a universal building block out
there somewhere, you should probably give this book a pass.
8½ Stars. Full disclosure: Leon
Lederman’s primary reason for writing The God Particle was to drum up public support for the continued funding of Fermilab’s Superconducting
Super Collider which in 1993 was being built in Waxahachie, Texas and plagued by financial issues and lots of structural snags.
This book was his last-ditch effort, and it failed. Construction had started in 1988, Lederman’s book was published in 1993, and the project was scrubbed by the US Congress later that year.
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