CERN and the Higgs Boson: The Global Quest for the Building Blocks of Reality

by James Gillies

Overview

The Higgs boson is the rock star of fundamental particles, catapulting CERN, the laboratory where it was found, into the global spotlight. But what is it, why does it matter, and what exactly is CERN?

In the late 1940s, a handful of visionaries were working to steer Europe towards a more peaceful future through science, and CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, was duly born. James Gillies tells the gripping story of particle physics, from the original atomists of ancient Greece, through the people who made the crucial breakthroughs, to CERN itself, one of the most ambitious scientific undertakings of our time, and its eventual confirmation of the Higgs boson.
Weaving together the scientific and political stories of CERN's development, the book reveals how particle physics has evolved from being the realm of solitary genius to a global field of human endeavour, with CERN's Large Hadron Collider as its frontier research tool.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785783937
Publisher:	Icon Books, Ltd. UK
Publication date:	10/04/2018
Series:	Hot Science
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	861,878
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

James Gillies is a member of the Strategic Planning and Evaluation unit at CERN. He was Head of the Organization's communications group from 2003 to 2015, and is co-author of How the Web was Born, a history of the Internet published in 2000 and described by the Times as being among the year's ten best books for inquisitive minds.

Table of Contents

About the author vi

Author's note vii

1 Breaking news 1

2 Atomos 13

3 From the ashes 30

4 A new laboratory is born 44

5 The birth of the big machines 52

6 In theory 64

7 New kids on the block 81

8 From a November revolution to W and Z 99

9 The race for the Higgs 110

10 Supercollider! 126

11 What's the use? 144

Epilogue: What next? 153

Further reading 157

Index 159