Description
A leading member of the team at the Large Hadron Collider discusses his career in physics and his team's hunt for the elusive Higgs boson.
Collection
Publication
Headline; edition (2015-05-07) (1800)
User reviews
LibraryThing member nmarun
I consider myself only a Science enthusiast and I'll admit that this book was too much for me - too many concepts, too many jargons, basically too many "particles"!
To make things easier, the author includes a glossary section in a few chapters. They are, without a doubt, of great help. I also had
The book could have mentioned some of the risks of running the LHC at such high energies, but again, I'm not sure if the author considers that to be in scope of 'Finding Higgs'.
I'll still give it a 5 star because I ended up learning quite a bit about Particle Physics and the Standard Model and I'll probably come back to a book like this after I'm more comfortable with these terminologies.
To make things easier, the author includes a glossary section in a few chapters. They are, without a doubt, of great help. I also had
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to read some articles online to bring myself on par with the standard of the book.The book could have mentioned some of the risks of running the LHC at such high energies, but again, I'm not sure if the author considers that to be in scope of 'Finding Higgs'.
I'll still give it a 5 star because I ended up learning quite a bit about Particle Physics and the Standard Model and I'll probably come back to a book like this after I'm more comfortable with these terminologies.
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LibraryThing member Muir_Alex
This ranks as one of the best scientific books that I have read to date. I have to admit that I was somewhat nervous picking up a book about particle physics at the library, but the field is always something that I wanted to know more about, so I decided to give it a shot. Butterworth is, without a
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doubt, one of the most entertaining non-fiction writers that I have had the pleasure of reading. He keeps the text lighthearted while at the same time conveying key knowledge points. He does this mainly through the use of metaphors, and the reader can tell that he is talented at breaking down complex concepts and explaining them to people with no prior knowledge of the subject matter. That said, the book begins with a fast pace, and the reader should expect to be confused for the first fifth or third of the book. I found myself going back and reviewing concepts that I had read a few days before in order to fully understand the new section that I was reading. However, as my gradual confusion lifted (and Butterworth was instrumental in this - he repeats fundamental concepts enough to help the reader learn), I was able to gain a full understanding of what Butterworth was saying. When I finished reading this book, I came out with a basic understanding of a field that I had known absolutely nothing about, and I enjoyed the ride. There isn't much more to ask for in a book about particle physics. Show Less
LibraryThing member breic
A pretty decent narrative science story of the LHC's search for the Higgs boson. Butterworth does a good job explaining how this kind of physics works, and what the many experimentalists are all doing. There are pleasant anecdotes from his own life—although I'm not entirely sure what his job
> It is very important not to use up your best collaboration name on the first proposal, since you will almost certainly have to merge with some other proposal and therefore have to pick a new name at some point. I can only presume CMS made this mistake.
> In the simulated data, the pulse had come out in order of wire number, 1–8. In the real data they came out in order of arrival time, which depended on where the particle was! Once we took it into account properly, all the crazy numbers lined up again.
> Back at ZEUS, I nervously tapped the shift leader on the shoulder and showed him the reading. The effect was dramatic. He leapt out of the room, ran up the stairs and pressed the emergency power cut-off for the entire rucksack. They had turned off the cooling water but not the electronics. A few more minutes and the delicate, expensive electronics, the product of years of work, would have fried.
> it takes a lot of energy to make a W or a Z, and even when you have one, it will very rapidly decay to other particles, meaning the weak force is short-range and, indeed, weak
> Experimentalists get ignored if they are right (e.g. about the speed of neutrinos), and hugely cited if they are wrong. Theorists are ignored if they are wrong, but get a Nobel Prize if they are right.
> even though the protons have an energy of 4000 GeV each (so a total energy of 8000 GeV available), any given quark or gluon only carries a fraction of the full energy of the proton, so the available energy to make new particles is generally a factor of five or ten lower than the proton energy might indicate.
> Given the time zones involved, it would be possible to spend every hour of every European working day, and most of the night, in an ATLAS meeting. Since they are nearly all available via some form of teleconference, with enough connections you could spend most of the day in half a dozen of them at the same time. This would of course melt your brain. To add insult to injury, a curious phenomenon has emerged. The moment a meeting begins to get interesting, one of the participants (usually the chair) will almost invariably suggest they ‘take it offline’. And we move on to the next topic.
> there are ideas to collide muons. These are heavy versions of electrons, so they have all the advantages of electrons but much less synchrotron radiation (1.6 billion times less, since they are 200 times heavier than electrons). One problem here is they decay in 2.2 microseconds
There are a few inaccuracies, in his descriptions of quantum physics and statistics, but nothing too serious.
> … these constraints told us that if the Standard Model Higgs boson existed, there was a 95 per cent chance that its mass lay between 42 and 159 GeV.
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was—and he goes into more detail than most writers would dare. Lots of long digressions into other areas of physics. The casual style works. I can't say I understood or will remember all these details, and I can't tell if Butterworth himself understands them all, but I appreciated the effort. > It is very important not to use up your best collaboration name on the first proposal, since you will almost certainly have to merge with some other proposal and therefore have to pick a new name at some point. I can only presume CMS made this mistake.
> In the simulated data, the pulse had come out in order of wire number, 1–8. In the real data they came out in order of arrival time, which depended on where the particle was! Once we took it into account properly, all the crazy numbers lined up again.
> Back at ZEUS, I nervously tapped the shift leader on the shoulder and showed him the reading. The effect was dramatic. He leapt out of the room, ran up the stairs and pressed the emergency power cut-off for the entire rucksack. They had turned off the cooling water but not the electronics. A few more minutes and the delicate, expensive electronics, the product of years of work, would have fried.
> it takes a lot of energy to make a W or a Z, and even when you have one, it will very rapidly decay to other particles, meaning the weak force is short-range and, indeed, weak
> Experimentalists get ignored if they are right (e.g. about the speed of neutrinos), and hugely cited if they are wrong. Theorists are ignored if they are wrong, but get a Nobel Prize if they are right.
> even though the protons have an energy of 4000 GeV each (so a total energy of 8000 GeV available), any given quark or gluon only carries a fraction of the full energy of the proton, so the available energy to make new particles is generally a factor of five or ten lower than the proton energy might indicate.
> Given the time zones involved, it would be possible to spend every hour of every European working day, and most of the night, in an ATLAS meeting. Since they are nearly all available via some form of teleconference, with enough connections you could spend most of the day in half a dozen of them at the same time. This would of course melt your brain. To add insult to injury, a curious phenomenon has emerged. The moment a meeting begins to get interesting, one of the participants (usually the chair) will almost invariably suggest they ‘take it offline’. And we move on to the next topic.
> there are ideas to collide muons. These are heavy versions of electrons, so they have all the advantages of electrons but much less synchrotron radiation (1.6 billion times less, since they are 200 times heavier than electrons). One problem here is they decay in 2.2 microseconds
There are a few inaccuracies, in his descriptions of quantum physics and statistics, but nothing too serious.
> … these constraints told us that if the Standard Model Higgs boson existed, there was a 95 per cent chance that its mass lay between 42 and 159 GeV.
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LibraryThing member vguy
Mixed response. Basically an insider account of the discovery of the Higgs Boson. The physics is way beyond me - the vocab alone is pretty daunting - really beyond the level of a popularising book for the lay reader. It's interspersed with "human" stories, some pretty trivial, some with a bit more
Part of my current campaign to read more science.Not ideal as an audio book, since it's harder to flip back over a puzzling passage.
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weight; they finish up being the only thing I could really grasp. Nonetheless, learned something, e.g. that a boson is a kind of particle of which the Higgs is only one variety.Part of my current campaign to read more science.Not ideal as an audio book, since it's harder to flip back over a puzzling passage.
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Awards
Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize (Shortlist — 2015)
Physics World Book of the Year (Shortlist — 2014)
Original publication date
2014