The Infinity Puzzle
How the Hunt to Understand the Universe Led to Extraordinary Science, High Politics, and the Large Hadron Collider
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
We are living in a Golden Age of physics. With the mind of a scientist and the skill of a journalist, bestselling author and renowned physicist Frank Close gives us an insider's look at one of the most inspiring - and challenging - scientific breakthroughs of our time: the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
About 40 years ago, 3 brilliant, yet little-known scientists made breakthroughs that later inspired the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva: a 27-kilometre-long machine which has already cost $10 billion, taken 20 years to build and now promises to reveal how the universe itself came to be. The Infinity Puzzle is the inside story of those 40 years of research, breakthrough and endeavour. The work of Peter Higgs, Gerard 't Hooft and James Bjorken is explored here, played out across the decades against a backdrop of high politics, low behaviour and billion-dollar budgets. In The Infinity Puzzle, eminent physicist and award-winning author Frank Close writes from within the action and draws upon his close friendships with those involved.
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.
