Update: here’s the amazon page, where the book is ready for pre-order.
Speaking of writing popular books, I’m at it again. I’m currently hard at work writing The Particle At the End of the Universe, a popular-level book on the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the Higgs boson. If all goes well, it should appear in bookstores at the end of this year or beginning of next. (Ideally, it will go on sale the same day they announce the discovery of the Higgs. I’m trying to bribe the right people to make that happen.) The title is somewhat tentative, so it might change at some point.
This will be a somewhat different book than From Eternity to Here. While both are aimed at a general audience, FETH was a rather lengthy tome that made a careful argument in a hopefully novel way. Anyone could read it, but to get the most out of it you have to really sit and think about certain ideas. Particle, on the other hand, aims to be a fun and narratively gripping page-turner — a book that makes you eager to move quickly to the next chapter, rather than taking a few minutes to let the last one sink into your head. A bodice-ripper, if you will. It will be full of stories and fun anecdotes about the human beings who made the LHC happen and have devoted their lives to searching for the Higgs and particles beyond the Standard Model. A book you would be happy to give to your Grandmom in order to convey some of the excitement of modern physics. (Unless your Grandmom is a particle physicist, in which case she might think it’s at too low a level.)
At the same time, of course, I’m going to try to illuminate the central ideas of the Standard Model in as clear a fashion as I can manage. It won’t just be a list of particles; I’ll cover field theory, gauge bosons, and spontaneous symmetry breaking. All in fine bodice-ripping style. (Maybe get Fabio for the cover?)
If you are a particle physicist yourself, I’m happy to take input. This could take the form of a favorite analogy you like to use to explain some subtle concept, or some physics idea or piece of history you think really doesn’t get the attention it deserves in the popular media. Even better if you have some personal involvement in a fun story — you lost your virginity in the LHC tunnel, or you discovered asymptotic freedom but didn’t get around to publishing it. I’m talking to as many physicists as I can, but I can’t talk to everyone. I’m looking for tales that will make the human side of physics come alive.
Also happy to take input if you’re not a particle physicist! What are the concepts that we don’t do a good job explaining? What are the buzzwords you’ve heard about the don’t make sense? The questions you really want answered?
I sincerely believe the search for the Higgs and whatever might lie beyond is a Big Deal in the history of science, and I hope to convey some of the importance and excitement of this question to as large an audience as possible. I’ll be flitting around the country giving talks when the book comes out, so let me know if you have a big lecture hall full of eager minds that want to hear the latest dispatches from the particle trenches. Should be a fun ride.
@14. Lee Gomes
If the collision were to happen right in front of you, you’d probably see nothing. Most of the radiation is given off in gamma rays which is too high of an energy to actually see. And any particles lasting long enough to fly off you couldn’t see anyway. Now you might see a little burst of light similar to what the astronauts see when a cosmic ray passes through their eyeballs. This is usually Cherenkov radiation. A particle traveling faster than light in a medium, in your case water. This is what causes the blue glow when radioactive waste is stored in water.
The modern viewpoint of the Higgs mechanism would be interesting. ie whether or not gauge symmetry is *really* broken (since neither is it a proper symmetry, nor can we actually lose gauge freedom, unless we properly account for the degrees of freedom).
I have to know. Is the book title inspired by the book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restaurant_at_the_End_of_the_Universe
How, exactly, does the Higgs provide mass. Where does the Higgs get its mass?
Spin is what it seems, at least to some extent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein-de_Haas_effect
Looking forward to it, for sure.
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Bee links to a post on her own blog that I thought (hoped?) contained a bodice-ripping description of the type of virginity losing event that Sean alluded to in the post. Boy, was I ever disappointed!
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Sean, how do you see your book compare with Veltman’s Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics (which I think is excellent by the way) in terms of content?
I think you should discuss Dyson’s argument on why it may be impossible to ever detect a graviton because the detectors would have to be so large as to form a black hole.
What is the relationship of the Higgs boson with bosons as the force carriers? I.E., if bosons are particles that carry force, and Higgs is not a particle related to any force, then why it is a boson? What did I understand wrong?
Thanks in advance.
@ Filip:
In answer to your question, you’ve got it the wrong way round: rather than “bosons are particles that carry force”, it’s “force carriers are bosons”. The electromagnetic, strong and weak interactions are mediated by particles called “vector bosons”. The Higgs is a “scalar boson” (vectors have one unit of spin; scalars have no spin).
Now it’s clear. Thanks James.
Cheers
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is something I don’t really understand at all. Not even well enough to ask a good question. It is something like a pencil standing on its tip, or a ball on a hill or in a donut shaped well or, well, something; I have no idea. What symmetry is being broken? What breaks it, etc? I take it this will be important in describing the Higgs but I hope you devote some extra ink to that topic so I can finally understand it.
As a layperson, I would be interested in having the following concepts addressed:
Is the Higgs field responsible for all mass in the universe; or restated, would there be no mass at all in the universe without the Higgs? By imparting mass to particles, is the Higgs field ultimately responsible for the geometry of spacetime; or again restated, without the Higgs to impart mass, would spacetime geometry be Euclidean? Address the concepts of “rest” mass and mass-energy equivalency with respect to the Higgs field. Without the Higgs, would particles gain mass as they accelerate to the speed of light? I’ve heard it figuratively stated that a massless photon traveling at the speed of light does not experience time; or restated, from the photon’s perspective, no time passes as it travels across the universe at light-speed and thus it will have existed everywhere in its journey at once. Does this imply that without the Higgs field, time itself would not exist, since all particles would be massless and free to accelerate to light speed, moving through the universe with no sense of a passage of time?
From my questions, you can possibly see some basic misconceptions about the Higgs floating about that you can help to address/correct/explain/clarify. Thanks!
How does the exchange of particles actually explain the conventional idea of a force, i.e. attraction and repulsion? Is the weak force even a force in this sense?
@41: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1489
First describe what constitutes a ‘particle’ for the layperson. They may have heard of the double slit experiment and wave / particle duality- and accept that conundrum when applied to photons or electrons. But what about particles of matter they can see down a microscope? I have yet to read a detailed dissection of the double slit experiment applied to what the lay person would regard as solid material made of ‘solid’ particles – C60 and diamond. So a detailed run down of Aspect’s and Zeilinger’s work would be valuable. Zeilingers book dodges the task, so do Cox and Forshaw.
My students hate anecdotes. GET BACK TO THE STORY they keep saying. Worth bearing in mind…
As a prequel to this book, you might be interested in The hitchhiker’s guide to particle physics and string theory.
I doubt the subject hasn’t been explained “well” to a lay audience. Rather, I suspect it’s very difficult to explain to a lay audience better without high-level mathematics.
But I’ll put it out there, nonetheless: An explication of the role of gauge invariance and the Lie groups at the heart of the Standard Model. Is there any way to intuitively grasp the nature of these symmetries as they relate to the forces the SM describes? I’ve never felt like I could. I sort of get the idea that spatial rotations don’t change certain laws, yadda yadda, but there are many kinds of “local transformations”.
This is the real meat of particle theory, it seems, what really makes it remarkable. It’s these symmetries that confer beauty, and it’s arguably this kind of beauty most theorists search for as they attempt to go beyond the SM. And for all that I’ve read about it, I’m convinced that I don’t really understand it at all. Maybe I never will, but I’m always open to new takes on that subject.
I think one of the bigger helpers I’ve had in understanding the Higgs field is that slowing a particle down is the same as granting mass because of the relativistic invariant m²=E²/c²-p²c². That is, suppose you have a particle that moves at the speed of light. It is necessarily massless because of the contraction of its four-momentum. As soon as anything slows it down, that particle has mass. So the Higgs field doesn’t “give” particles mass, it just slows them down. I feel like that’s easier to understand than saying the interaction itself is directly responsible for mass. I think some people would say this is a semantic issue but it helped me a bit.
Maybe I’m just proving why I don’t write books on particle physics myself…
The big problem I’ve always had is – what’s up with this bit about the vacuum not actually being a vacuum at all – and what happens if you take the stuff that makes up the vacuum out? I know they keep saying you can’t do that – but … then you run into them talking about “false vacuums” and “dirac seas” where “holes act like particles”, and at some point, you have to wonder about Michelson-Morley experiments and the difference between this sea of negative particles and the aether – the difference is kinda sketchy!
Sounds like a great book, I can’t wait to buy it.
Since you asked for input, here is one of my great wants:
An explanation of quantum entanglement and waveform collapse in such a fashion that I have some slam-dunk material to use next time my annoying new age friends and family start trying to talk about energy fields healing them, and their thoughts directly influencing the cosmos. Ugh!
Even if this does not go in your book, please do a blog post.
Or if a fellow reader knows of somewhere something like this already exists, please post a link.
Thank you!