The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World

to the theoretical background that spurred construction of the Large Hadron Collider to try to find it.

Not much math, in fact the most complicated equation is e = m * c^2.

This is fine, because the author describes, very well, in layman's terms, what the Standard Model is, how it is arranged, what the various particles are, how the Large Hadron Collider works, and how colliding two protons at near C speeds creates a tremendous amount of energy, which because of the above equation becomes mass which normally doesn't exist. He also shows how a Higgs Boson can be detected by its decay products.

I'm close to finishing it, and although it might be a while, it probably would be worth a second read. (I also need to find and reread my copy of The God Particle.)

There's a movie mentioned in the book. It's Particle Fever, and is on U-Tube. That shows better the scale of the LHC, including the tubes, and the detectors.

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This made a great partner book to "The God Particle". While the former covers the history of particle physics through about 1997; this book, is more contemporary and more technical, covering through the discovery of the Higgs Boson thought to originate in the Higgs field. The Higgs field is still part of the "last chapter" in of the Standard Model of the universe. But wait!!! Happily it goes on to address thinking about the theorized (as of July 2012) dark matter, dark force and strings. The number of undiscovered particles, though mentioned, seriously whets our appetite for what lies BEYOND the Standard Model! Though the Higgs boson is amazing, the Higgs field............

Particle physics is a tough subject to write about, but you can tell that Mr. Carroll has a vast and profound knowledge of the subject. The book is both readable and informative. Terrific work.

The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World by Sean Carroll won the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.

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 (LHC) at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event.

As an aside, understanding the physics of the Higgs Boson is no mean feat. Consider Wikipedia’s explanation:
In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson with no spin, electric charge, or color charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. It is a quantum excitation of one of the four components of the Higgs field. The latter constitutes a scalar field, with two neutral and two electrically charged components, and forms a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry. The field has a "Mexican hat" shaped potential with nonzero strength everywhere (including otherwise empty space) which in its vacuum state breaks the weak isospin symmetry of the electroweak interaction.
When this happens, three components of the Higgs field are "absorbed" by the SU(2) and U(1) gauge bosons (the "Higgs mechanism") to become the longitudinal components of the now-massive W and Z bosons of the weak force. The remaining electrically neutral component separately couples to other particles known as fermions (via Yukawa couplings), causing these to acquire mass as well. Some versions of the theory predict more than one kind of Higgs fields and bosons.

Yes I know what you’re thinking…

And more than once the reader of this book is comes across sections which might as well be read as a part of an advanced physics curriculum. Carroll writes "Whenever we have symmetry that allows us to do independent transformations at different points (a gauge symmetry), it automatically comes with a connection field that lets us compare what is going on at those locations,"

But here is the difference, not only does Carroll acknowledge the complexity of the science, he goes to great lengths to pace his book carefully as well as taking, were possible, a light natured story telling style. This includes trivialities and frivolities which are not short in supply when you consider there are 6000 scientists and technicians who work on the world’s largest particle accelerator, The LHC. 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. A project sure to lead some to win the Nobel Prize.

Carroll explains the importance of the LHC - learn that sub-atomic particles come in two varieties: fermions that make up matter, and bosons that carry forces. The latter include gluons, photons, gravitons and of course the Higgs. The former, the fermions, include leptons such as the electron and quarks of which there are six types: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. On top of that we have issues of symmetry, force fields and wave functions. However, the over ambitious attempt to write the definitive account of the laws of nature for the layman there are great chunks of text which are not only demanding but may leave us with the impression that such an account is simply not feasible.

I heard this author on PBS and was very impresses. A nephew is a Physics major and i got this for him because of that. He loved it, along with "The Dancing Wu Lu Masters" (which is now dated, but still interesting.)

Sean's writing is very accessible to the lay reader. He breaks down the ways that the various fields relate to each other in dynamic and easily accessible descriptions. He also provides the background on the different thinkers who contributed to the pursuits to isolate and understand the fundamental particles over the past century.

Mr Carroll does a great job with a pretty difficult subject if I as a none-academic can grasp what it's all about.
Well maybe not all of it but enough to keep reading.
As a person born in the 1920's it is incredible to my understanding of that silly word progress that we humans who in my time have spent so much of it trying to kill each other could get so many good minds together and even more so, so many practical makers of machinery to get inside the inside of the inside.

Well done one and all, not forgetting Amazon for helping to spread the word.

Ray

This was a well written book that covered a lot of territory. it had many photos and Feynmann diagrams that helped in understanding concepts

This book is one of several that has come out due to (capitalizing on?) the discovery of
the 'God Particle' aka the Higgs Boson, which is one of the major and glaring
missing pieces of the the Standard Model, which is the theory describing the
present state of nuclear physics to this date.

This long awaited proof of the existence of the Higgs, confirms our understanding of
mass.

When we speak of mass on a macroscopic level, we say that object is more massive because
it has more atoms..etc.

But on a fundamental level, why is the electron 1840 times smaller than a proton..etc?

It due to the way these particles interact with the Higgs Field, which in turn is mediated
by the Higgs boson, much the same way that electromagnetic fields are mediated by
photons.

But the table in Appx 2, p294 has some typos:

Down quarks have charge -1/3e.

Up type quarks are top, charm, and up.
Down type quarks are bottom, strange and down.
Lepton types are tau, muon, and electrons.

In the chapter 'Beyond the Horizon', the author provides a cosmological viewpoint
due to his background.