The Infinity Puzzle
The personalities, politics, and extraordinary science behind the Higgs boson
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
We are living in a Golden Age of Physics. Forty or so years ago, three brilliant, yet little-known scientists - an American, a Dutchman, and an Englishman - made breakthroughs which later inspired the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva: a 27 kilometre-long machine that cost ten billion dollars, took twenty years to build, and finally discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The Infinity Puzzle is the inside story of those forty years of research, breakthrough, and endeavour. Peter Higgs, Gerard 't Hooft and James Bjorken were the three scientists whose work is explored here, played out across the decades against a backdrop of high politics, low behaviour, and billion dollar budgets. Written by Frank Close, the eminent physicist and award-winning writer, The Infinity Puzzle also draws upon the author's close friendships with those involved.
In July 2012, in the days leading up to the momentous announcement that the Higgs boson had indeed been discovered, Frank Close and Peter Higgs were together at a conference in Sicily. In this paperback edition, Close includes a substantial epilogue reflecting on the announcement, its implications, and the impact on Peter Higgs and others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Close (The Cosmic Onion) explains the science behind the $10 billion international effort to discover the Higgs boson: a fundamental subatomic particle that scientists believe could account for the origins of our universe. Under the auspices of CERN in Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was constructed to accelerate particles near to the speed of light. By creating miniature matter/anti-matter collisions in "a small region of space, what the universe as a whole was like in the first moments after the Big Bang." Close voyages through the major scientific discoveries in high energy physics that began in 1928, when Paul Dirac married quantum mechanics with Special Relativity, laying the basis for the major technical advances from which we benefit in today's digital world. Along the way we meet some major figures in the field whose breakthroughs have illuminated the deepest mysteries of physics and cosmology, resulting in an engrossing history that's also accessible for a general audience.
