a great book
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As one Nobel Prize winning reviewer wrote this is a truly amazing masterpiece'. It has very clear discussions on the wave-particle duality, two-slit interference, the 'particle zoo' including lots on quarks, Feynman diagrams, octets, etc, etc. With some good illustrations, almost no maths and around 200 mini biographies of particle physicists it is of great interest.
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Three marks for Muster Quark
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As one old and unadventurous enough to have taken Dirac's pronouncementthat 'the underlying physical laws for the mathematical theory of a largepart of physics and the whole of chemistry are .. completely known' as anexcuse to eschew nuclear (or was it unclear) and elementary particlephysics at an early age, I found this book both entertaining andinformative. Much as when, in the fifties, I read Coulson's 'Valence' orPeierls' 'Quantum Theory of Solids', and thought 'these chaps have got itsorted', I was seduced by an authoritative, elegant and highly personalview of a newly mature field of physics. (You might already have guessedthat the three star 'mark' is an old man's idea of a joke.) The standardmodel is presented up-front, sparing the reader three decades of messingabout and providing a matrix within which beautiful experiments andtheories can be presented coherently. Special relativity and quantummechanics are ushered in carefully and without too much fuss: no attemptis made to obscure their essentially non-classical, and counter intuitive,elements. Once Veltman has breached these conceptual barriers he is on hisway. A heartfelt account of the physics, politics, economics andpersonalities of the Big Science of the sixties and seventies leads thereader to the point where physics got itself back on track and againbecame quite beautiful. Chapters 9-11 present what is, for me, the core ofthe book. Veltman's and t'Hooft's 'Diagrammar' was, for some, the Biblein the seventies; here we have a marvellous Sunday School Version of thegood book. The argument, that the requirement of renormalisabilty tellsyou when to keep going and when to stop, is presented ever so clearly; wecan also see why looking for the Higgs is a good thing. And then, whoops,Veltmann really rude about strings, SUSY and all that; why? - "they're noteven wrong, they have no place here". I hope that one day someone willwrite a book, perhaps even as good as this one, explaining why theseheresies(or things not un-related to them) have taken us another couple ofsteps forward in understanding the Universe.
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Disappointing
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This has all the makings of an excellent book - a Nobel laureate writing for the layman, not just setting out his subject but giving the exciting history of his discoveries. The book is beautifully produced, with many photographs and a number of vignettes by the author. I believe I am exactly the reader it is aimed at, having just completed an elementary level Open University course on cosmology and particle physics. I have to confess, however, to great disappointment with the book. Although all the ideas are there, as advertised, they are by no means as lucidly presented as they might have been. A major drawback is that English is not the author's native tongue. Many times I found myself puzzling over what he was trying to express, only to discover that it was an idea I knew and understood well from my previous studies, but which was being presented in the most obscure English. For those prepared to struggle through this, I fully agree with the positive comments of the previous reviewers. But this is not the lucid text book for beginners that it claims to be, and sadly this is for quite the wrong reason.
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One more book on particle physics
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The book of Martinus Veltman is a thorough description of the world of elementary particle physics. It begins with the basic concepts that gave birth to quantum mechanics, and presents the (really) elementary particles. The approach is sometimes historical but the book mainly concentrates on what is currently known and not known in particle physics. It goes from the description of the different elementary particles (what are they, their reactions, their bound states), to the technical developments of particle accelerators and detectors, and to the development of QED and QCD. All this is included. Additionally, it presents vignettes with biographical sketches of the different intervening actors in all these discoveries, even if their names are not referred explicitly in the main text. It surely represents valuable complementary information. However, one cannot say that the subject is an easy one to deal with. When I started to read this book I realised one very important thing that always make me uncomfortable about similar books. The historical perspective that is usually put into their approach, especially when it refers to the enormous amount of particles that were discovered as the result of particle collisions, is really the worse way to introduce this subject; no wonder the confusion if even the physicists were confused themselves. On the contrary, Veltman approaches this by explicitly stating form the beginning that most of those particles are not really elementary but just quark bound states, and does not loose very much time with them, unless to put them into the historical development of the ideas. Besides, for the very first time I really understood a bit more about the diagrams of the eightfold way! However, the reactions, the quantum numbers (spin, strangeness, barion, whatever...), etc, give a very hard time to anyone reading this book. It is really quite difficult to keep track of all these things at once. I feel very much like reading a cook recipe book: add x of this, put y of that, and... voilá! This is what you get. Veltman is the first one to admit that physicists still do not know a lot of stuff about what is going on that particle kitchen, and you really have a great number of statements of which one can expect very little than just accept them as face value, otherwise they are just not understandable at all. Even to understand a bit more of what is going on, one really needs to be a professional physicist. So, the aim to reach a larger audience is severely compromised. A famous physicist once said that if you are unable to explain a physical theory to the lay person then you do not really understand it. I believe this illustrates quite well what is going on in the world of particle physics, and the odd way the quantum world is described is probably a result of the our ill-understanding of much that is happening on all those experiments. A great deal of what is being done is to just add one more experimental evidence to the Standard Model. Ironically, Rutherford once said that physics is the one and true science, the others were just stamp collecting. I think that physics has turned into a stamp collecting science as well, and the next stamp for the collection seems to be the Higgs.
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waow ! impressive !
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I have not finished the whole book yet but I can tell you it is possibly the best book on the topic - at this level - ever written so far (and I think I have read most of the books on particle physics for non specialists).
The biographical snapshots and pictures are really interesting. I have seen Veltman a few times when I was myself working at CERN (as an engineer, not a physicist) and he struck me as a no-nonsense kind of fellow. This shines through this marvellous book.
If you ever buy only one overview book on particle physics, make it this one (maybe together with the one from his co-Nobel winner and "best enemy": t'Hooft - publ. by Cambridge Un. press).
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