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Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass
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21/99
Critics
35/99
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15/99
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About This Book
*A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Selection* The first major biography of Peter Higgs, revealing how a short burst of work changed modern physics On July 4, 2012, the announcement came that one of the longest-running mysteries in physics had been solved: the Higgs boson, the missing piece in understanding why particles have mass, had finally been discovered. On the rostrum, surrounded by jostling physicists and media, was the particle's retiring namesake—the only person in history to have an existing single particle named for them. Why Peter Higgs? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and others, Close illuminates how an unprolific man became one of the world's most famous scientists. Close finds that scientific competition between people, institutions, and states played as much of a role in making Higgs famous as Higgs's work did. A revelatory study of both a scientist and his era, Elusive will remake our understanding of modern physics.
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Reviews
"It is those three weeks that anchor the real story in this book, a clear, vivid and occasionally even beautiful portrait of a scientific breakthrough: the tale of how a relatively obscure Scotland-based physicist developed a stunning theory, one that would help illuminate the invisible, particulate web that holds our universe together ..."
"Close offers a sympathetic biography of the 'shy, modest' man and famous particle, shedding rather more light on the complexities of the latter."
"A lucid writer, Close chooses his words carefully and employs a torrent of analogies, but readers who skipped college physics may have to accept his enthusiasm on faith and enjoy an exciting account of the search, which required building the world's most powerful particle accelerator (and the world's biggest machine): the spectacular Large Hadron Collider beneath the French-Swiss border ..."
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