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How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
Dutton
November 2012
On Sale: November 13, 2012
352 pages
ISBN: 0525953590
EAN: 9780525953593
Kindle: B008BM0IUG
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a
par with the splitting of the atom: the Higgs boson, the key
to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The
Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist
and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the
scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the
scientists and explain this landmark event.
The
Higgs boson is the particle that more than six thousand
scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron
Collider, the world’s largest and highest energy particle
accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in
circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss
border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this
search has now cost over $9 billion and required the
collaboration of engineers from more than one hundred
countries.
What is so special about the Higgs boson?
We didn’t really know for sure if anything at the subatomic
level had any mass at all until we found it. The fact is,
while we have now essentially solved the mass puzzle, there
are things we didn’t predict and possibilities we haven’t
yet dreamed. A doorway is opening into the mind boggling,
somewhat frightening world of dark matter. We only
discovered the electron just over a hundred years ago and
considering where that took us—from nuclear energy to
quantum computing--the inventions that will result from the
Higgs discovery will be world-changing.
The
Particle at the End of the Universe not only explains
the importance of the Higgs boson but also the Large Hadron
Collider project itself. Projects this big don’t happen
without a certain amount of conniving, dealing, and
occasional skullduggery— and Sean Carroll explores it all.
This is an irresistible story (including characters now set
to win the Nobel Prize among other glories) about the
greatest scientific achievement of our time.
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