New book,
HIGGS, Jim Baggott, Oxford University Press, 2012.
This book should be the long story of the "Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle'.
The reason I bought the book is that the Introduction was written by Nobel Laureate Dr Steven Weinberg. A part of the introduction was was published in the
New York Review of Books.
I have been enamored of CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ever since I saw the 1985 PBS video "Creation of the Universe" I think now on YouTube, by Timothy Ferris. In 1985, the tunnel which now houses the LHC and which will in about 2014 house the HL-LHC [HL prefix = High Luminosity], housed the LEP, the Large Electron Positron Collider. The Tevatron already in 1985 had been built at Fermi National Accelerator Lab [Fermilab]. Until the advent of the LHC, the Tevatron was the most powerful atom smasher in the world. There are two videos about all of this, both finally available at YouTube,
The Atom Smashers [2008] and
The Big Bang Machine [2008]. The first is primarily about the Tevatron and the people at Fermilab; the second is all about the LHC at CERN. Each center receives some mention in the film about the other.
Another effort to slake my thirst for Higgs was to participate in two Public Distributed Computing projects for CERN. On BOINC software, about 10,000 of us ran simulations of the turns in the beam lines, helping in 1.) calibrating the magnets which kept the spinning particles on their correct trajectories, and 2.) simulating the collision events themselves.
So, anyway, The Tevatron was only capable of power up to one TeV (terra electron volts), not enough to generate the subatomic particles which would yield up the Higgs boson of the Standard Model. But, take it from me, the Tevatron, with Nobel Laureate Dr Leon Lederman at the helm, put up a great battle. The Tevatron was shut down in 2011, it ran for about forty years, producing massive amounts of data, and made real the finding of a number of subatomic particles predicted by theoreticians.
The LHC, at 7 TeV has found a new subatomic particle, definitely a boson, at 5 sigma probability, but not yet with certainty the Higgs. The announcement was made it CERN July 4, 2012. This new book was started in 2010, but was revised after the announcements by ATLAS and CMS, the two CERN experiments with the mission of Higgs.
The first book I read on Higgs,
Massive, Ian Sample, 2010, Basic Books, is definitely a great book. It gives all of the background going back to Peter Higgs' 1964 derivation of the theory (he was not alone in predicting on a theoretical basis the necessity for the Higgs "field", a concept in Quantum Mechanics (QM). In QM, everything is related to a "quanta" a particle, even pure energy).
I am hoping for new and more material in this new book..
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