The Higgs boson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider (http://www.lhc.ac.uk/), the world’s largest 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? Scientists didn’t really know for sure if anything at the subatomic level had any mass at all until they found it. The fact is, while they have now essentially solved the mass puzzle, there are things they didn’t predict . A doorway is opening into the mind boggling, somewhat frightening world of dark matter. Humans 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 promise to be world-changing.
The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll, theoretical cosmologist at CalTech (http://www.caltech.edu/) (http://preposterousuniverse.com/) 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. Carroll explores it all. This is an irresistible story (including characters now set to win the Nobel Prize among other glories) about one of the greatest scientific achievements of our time. Get yourself smarter by getting some understanding of it.
360 pages in OneWorld Publications paperback edition
ISBN 978-1780742458
Sean Carroll