The God particle
The quest began in 430 B.C. when a Greek philosopher smelled bread baking and imagined that an invisible particle might be the building block of all matter. He called it the a-tom - "that which cannot be cut"--And its pursuit has become science's longest-running experiment. Now, in a book of dazzling originality, Nobel laureate Leon Lederman tells the story of the 2,500-year search for the answer to an ancient question: what is the world made of? Lederman joined this search in the 1950s, and his many contributions to our understanding of subatomic architecture have ranked him among the foremost experimental physicists in the world. The God Particle is yet another remarkable achievement: drawing on a lifetime of research and teaching, Lederman shines such a clear light on the mysteries of matter that they are at last understandable to everyone.^ With great wit and erudition, he describes the long string of Eureka moments that have brought us tantalizingly close to unlocking the last secrets of the universe. Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Rutherford, and Einstein are just a few of the heroes in Lederman's tale, each one a brilliant detective looking for clues behind the veil of matter. The past fifty years have brought the development of the most complex experimental tool ever built - the particle accelerator, an immensely powerful knife that cuts matter into quarks and leptons and reveals the forces that drive them.
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What Hacker News says
- > According to the review the author proposes that there is no essence to things but only relations, but doesn't explain his theory completely.
As someone who loves science popularisers and reads a lot of them, that seems consistent with my experience of The order of time—which I couldn't even finish.
On the other hand, take my perspective with a grain of salt: I was also very much turned off by Hawking and Mlodinow's The grand design, which I think is otherwise very well received. I love Sean Carroll and Brian Greene as popularisers of what can be very inaccessible physics. (Oh, and it was a long time ago, but I loved Lederman's The God particle, much as he regretted his own naming later.)
- There is a great book about the Higgs boson called 'The God Particle'(http://www.amazon.com/God-Particle-Universe-Answer-Question/...) I haven't read the new version, but I thoroughly enjoyed the original book, highly recommended.
- > The problem with popular science books is that they are written by journalists untrained in science. It should be scientists who write popular works.
Yes, perhaps, but you need to realize something -- scientists who write popular books often pay a very high price. Not always, there are exceptions, but Carl Sagan is a perfect example of someone who did a lot of public good by popularizing science and scientific topics, but it ruined his scientific career.
Most scientists understand this -- to write a popular science book or article may send the signal to other scientists that you don't have anything more serious to write about. As a reward for such important projects as Cosmos, Sagan was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences, something extraordinary given his actual scientific accomplishments.
For balance, we can look at Leon Lederman ("The God Particle") and Stephen Hawking (several well-received books) who seem not to have suffered unduly for their popularizations of science. But the risk is real.
- Leon Lederman did not want to call it 'The God Particle', just the opposite 'Goddamn Particle'. "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Particle:_If_the_Univer...
- The author completely lost me at:
"The Higgs, of course, has been labelled the ‘god particle’ because it accounts for the existence of mass in the Universe."
No, it is called the "God Particle" because Leon Lederman called it the "Goddamned Particle" since he had so much trouble defining what it was and how it behaved, and his publisher shortened it to "The God Particle" because it had a snappier name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Higgs#Political_and_relig...
- Lederman said he gave it the nickname "The God Particle" because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive," but jokingly added that a second reason was because "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."
From (with more): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#.22The_God_particle...
While mass is quite fundamental even to the general public I agree, "the god particle" is just silly.
