Spoons and Higgs Boson

[jazzy_dave]

Woke up to a frosty morning. The air was quite chilled and cousin mentioned that he caught his breath on the way back from the post office. Midday, the sun came out and it was quite pleasant.

I was updating my ebay site and parcelled up some more books for posting. Tomorrow I might go to Faversham to peruse the charity shops for more bargains.

I am still reading “The Disappearing Spoon”. It is an absorbing insight into the elements , and is already one of my recommendations of the year. The comments below sums up the book quite succinctly.

"This book is the literary equivalent of a prime-time documentary on the Discovery Channel or BBC1: populist, accessible, and elementary (boom-boom!), without being simplistic ... You don't need to know your p from your d orbitals to understand, enjoy and learn from a book carefully written by an author keen to share his enthusiasm with a wider audience ... even for those of us with science backgrounds, The Disappearing Spoon remains diverting and entertaining ... The cast of characters makes it entertaining and accessible ... Given the lamentable state of education about science among the general public, we should applaud Kean's ability to bring chemistry to the masses."--Mark Greener, Fortean Times

This afternoon , I spent an hour down the library, and the librarian there asked me if I would like to go to the Xmas meeting in Sittingbourne on Thursday for all the volunteers. I might just come along especially as there will be food available.


Watching Have I Got News For You Sunday evening cousin and I had a few jocose moments , and I averred to Spot that this was the funniest one for a long while. I think he needed cheering up anyway. Neither of us feign ersatz emotion ,despite sometimes keeping them too close to our chests.

Also fascinating was “How To Build” , this time on satellites for communications and satellite channels.

Another book I recommended is “Massive, The Hunt for the God Particle” by Ian Sample (Virgin Boos).

A great book on a timely topic that is hard to write for general public. If you are looking for a book to explain what all the fuss is over the "God Particle" this is the one to read. Dr. Sample does a great job of bringing together the history, theory, and experimental aspects of the mass mechanism for everyone to understand. Everyone reads about the LHC and finding the "Higgs Boson" but little is written about the history and how this came to be.

It is a quick read and flows well with anecdotes about the people involved that are pulled out through extensive interviews and research. Certainly there will be an updated version of this once the results are confirmed from Fermi or LHC and Nobels are awarded - along with the associated controversies.

Strengths of the book include:
1) Well written and easy to read
2) Quick read
3) Handles tough topic for non-physicist
4) Sets up well for next edition
5) Well researched with great interviews of subjects (Weinberg for example)

While the book is very Peter Higgs' centric in chapters three and four that probably makes sense given the name of the boson and need for the story to focus on someone. The years that Higgs spend after the 1964 papers toiling with an extension and defending the findings were interesting while the other theorists moved on to other work in the USA and Belgium. Higgs was not actually the first to work on this since Guralnik and Hagen were working with Gilbert on the issue well before 1964. But overall the book is a great overview of the theory work that is not often shared.