A good new book

February 23, 2013 • 9:02 am

I’ve just finished physicist Sean Carroll’s new book, The Particle at the End of the Universe (subtitled: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World), and want to give it two thumbs up.  As far as I know, it’s the only popular account of the Higgs Hunt in book form, but even if it weren’t I’d recommend it as a lucid description of the meaning of the Higgs boson, how it fits into the Standard Model of particle physics, and as an engaging account of how the LHC was built and the interactions between the colorful personalities involved in the search (many of them were interviewed for the book).

I have to admit that although Carroll writes extremely clearly and knows his material inside out, it’s occasionally heavy going, but that’s because of the nature of the material.  To understand the meaning of the Higgs boson, and why finding it was so important, you have to know how it fits into the Standard Model, and what other particles are involved in that model. That means learning about fermions, bosons, quarks, and their properties and interactions; and even as a scientist I had to concentrate hard on the text. But the payoff is large: the reader comes away with a feeling that she now knows why the hunt for that particle was so important. (See the many positive reviews on Amazon for confirmation.)

I particularly liked Carroll’s last chapter, “Making it worth defending,” which explains why physicists invested so much time and money in hunting for a particle that doesn’t have obvious practical applications.  Yes, there might be technological spinoffs, as there was with other work on particle physics (the Internet originated with physicists’ need to access each other’s data), but in the main Carroll extols the virtue of simple curiosity:

At heart, science is the quest for awesome—the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the first time. It’s a feeling we are all born with, although it often gets lost as we grow up and more mundane concerns take over our lives. When a big event happens, like the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, that child-like curiosity in all of us comes to the fore once again. It took thousands of people to build the LHC and its experiments and to analyze the data that led to that discovery, but the accomplishment belongs to everyone who is interested in the enterprise.

Mohammed Yahia writes Nature magazine’s House of Wisdom blog, dedicated to science in the Middle East. After the July 4 seminars announcing the discovery of the Higgs, he celebrated the universality of the scientific impulse:

As people across the Arab world are all dealing with their politics, revolution, human rights issues and uprisings, science speaks to all of us equally and we become one. The only two human endeavors that are cross-boundary at this massive scale are art and science.

Compare that to religion, where there is no commonality of understanding or “knowledge”!

Carroll’s last chapter reminds me of a quote from H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices:

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves some of the greatest men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigators. What animates a great pathologist? Is it the desire to cure disease, to save life? Surely not, save perhaps as an afterthought. He is too intelligent, deep down in his soul, to see anything praiseworthy in such a desire. He knows by life-long observation that his discoveries will do quite as much harm as good, that a thousand scoundrels will profit to every honest man, that the folks who most deserve to be saved will probably be the last to be saved. No man of self-respect could devote himself to pathology on such terms. What actually moves him is his unquenchable curiosity–his boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but the dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

Carroll has it right: particle physics—like evolutionary biology—is akin to art.  There aren’t many practical applications in terms of making people rich or healthy, but they’re both fulfilling in helping us understand our world and in feeling a commonality with others.  Stretching our minds, whether it involves knowing how the universe works or putting oneself in another’s shoes, is one of the great luxuries of humanity now that (largely by virtue of science!) we’re freed from the drudgery, misery, and short lives of our ancestors. And it’s worth spending money on: public money, for we all benefit from it. Granted, there’s a limit to how much society can afford (the LHC cost about $6 billion dollars to build, and the running expenses are about $25 million per year).

I have been extraordinarily lucky to have a job I love, in which nobody tells me what to do except myself. Most people aren’t that fortunate. And I’m doubly fortunate that my job—my research—is underwritten by the largesse of American taxpayers: the grants given by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation to fund my studies.

And when you’re that fortunate, you feel a debt that should be repaid. Carroll and I both try to do that, in part, by making our fields accessible to the people who finance us. We write.

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47 thoughts on “A good new book”

  1. I sincerely hope that “heavy going” was an intentional pun! I’ll almost certainly give this a read as I enjoy Carroll’s writing, though I’ll wait for the paperback version.

  3. Always pleased when you tie in a Mencken quote—a brilliant one too.

    While searching Amazon for Carroll’s book, I saw that Lisa Randall has a well reviewed book, Higgs Discovery for 2.99. For now I’ll just save Carroll to my never ending list.

    2. As far as I know, Randall’s book on the Higgs discovery is available only as an ebook, which was published in July, 2012. Having read it, I regard it as a supplement to her Knocking on Heaven’s Door, which includes a lot of information about the LHC. Here’s a snippet about religion from the latter book:

      [A]ny religious scientist has to face daily the scientific challenge to his belief. The religious part of your brain cannot act at the same time as the scientific one. They are simply incompatible.

  5. absolutely LOVE the name of the book..here’s to the hope that mankind will continue to six impossible things before breakfast everyday.

    1. I just watched the 2nd interview. What struck me most was that Carroll did not even once say “um”. As if he was reading from a telepromter. Weird.

  8. Well now, I wouldn’t sell particle physics quite so short. Seeking knowledge simply for the sake of gaining knowledge is indeed a worthy pursuit.

    But who knows what practical and helpful things will come about because we gained that knowledge. Just to name one practical and helpful device, off the top of my head, for which we have particle physics to thank: smoke detectors. That is not insignificant. That is life-saving technology.

    Oh! And nuclear energy?

    And radiation therapy?

    1. Integrated circuits – without ion implantation, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

      But the Higgs field is different, it is a scalar field, so you will only create particles in it when you rattle it seriously with the LHC et cetera. The implicit use are rather towards its modern cousin cosmology, where the Higgs field should be akin to the inflaton field of inflation, scalar and universal.

      Practical use? Dunno.

    1. An update: Yesterday I just finished Dr Coyne’s U. Chicago colleague Neil Shubin’s book:

      The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People.

      I thought this book is also very well written. Dr Shubin did his research well and there are reams of references.

      1. Thanks for the tip about Dr. Shubin’s book. I will have to get that one and read it. His book “Your Inner Fish” has given me perfect ammunition for the Creationists. He explains how we get the hiccups because of an imperfect transition from gills to lungs. I love to ask Creationists if they have ever had the hiccups and then explain to them why!

        Also read Carroll’s book on the Higgs boson and it does an excellent job of explaining some very hard to understand concepts.

  10. And wouldn’t it be appropriate if the vacuum quasistability of a 125 GeV standard Higgs (if that is what the Higgs field particle is) stands, becoming our first observation of a multiverse?

    Then the End of the Universe would be the Beginning of Universes.

    The only two human endeavors that are cross-boundary at this massive scale are art and science.

    This is the sort of sweeping, unjustified social claim that makes me uneasy. Why discount food, music, dance, sport, work et cetera as universal? At least sports are world endeavours by the same token, but I would think the web has started to unite music and food as well.

    Even the Baining, the “dullest culture on Earth”, has work and food as staple, and know how to do stylized music, dance, and yes, art, when they want to (rarely). Why sex and play wouldn’t be universal is the mystery cultural behavior here, seeing animal behavior.

    1. I agree with you somewhat, but I am not sure that the claim is completely unjustified. There do seem to be “things” that cross cultural boundaries on “massive scales.” I do agree that “only” might be a little over doing it.

      I would point out, though, that food, music and dance, and perhaps in certain circumstances sport and work, are all arts. Taking a step back to a more general view, one thing that seems to be common with “things” that have crossed cultural boundaries on massive scales is that they have typically been examples of the very best that humans have achieved.

  11. > “Compare that to religion, where there is no commonality of understanding or “knowledge”!

    Tell the 2000 people who recently gathered to celebrate a goodbye mass for an 18 year old who laid down in despair on the tracks running through Charlottesville VA that there is no commonality of understanding, or “knowledge” in Religion for them. They all found solace in their lives through the rituals surrounding this young person’s death, mainly because the family, and the priest, respected the diversity of ways that each, including the atheists in the room, found to deal with their despair. Science and Religion both share the ultimate commonality of facing inevitable human despair. Neither has all the answers, and both leave some behind in how to successfully face it. As a scientist you must believe that the only meaning in the Universe is that which we create. Thus, meaning, by definition, is not empiric, but axiomatic. If you are sincere in saying that humans create meaning, then why is religious meaning any less valid than any other form?

    1. “If you are sincere in saying that humans create meaning, then why is religious meaning any less valid than any other form?”

      Because it is based on self delusion and fairy tales and operates on the authority of, and fear o,f a fictitious super being.

    3. They could have done all of that without being wrapped up in the very unlikely claim that there are god(s). It’s the insincerity of claiming to know an unknowable and quite possibly nonexistent entity that is troubling and trouble making.

    4. The “commonality” in that situation was despair — or, perhaps more accurately, relief from despair — and the nexus with religion, a matter of fortuity. (How else would you explain atheists finding solace in equal measure?)

    5. One can have a thin gruel of rice and a small cup of tea. Or one can have vegetables, spices and so on as well. We should work to ensure people can have the better food as well as the better culture.

      That said, I am not claiming a complete scale – some cultural choices are incommeasurable; whether you prefer to do physics or biology, poetry or violin, doesn’t matter.

  12. Also Ian Sample’s “Massive” which just came out in a new edition following the news from CERN.

    1. Yes, I was about to recommend that. I read it two years ago to prepare myself for the eventual discovery of the boson, as well as to understand the background. Thanks to that book I was able to explain the Higgs Boson to friends with only a mild interest in this endeavour. Thanks for pointing out it’s been updated. I’ll buy Sean’s book as well, mainly for what he has to say, but also because I love him.

  14. I got this book for Xmas although I haven’t gotten to read it yet. I did enjoy his last book “From Eternity to Here”.

    I am currently watching the series of lectures that Sean Carroll did for The Teaching Company on the arrow of time. They are great too although a bit more expensive than the book. Highly recommended.

  15. A minor correction: it’s the World Wide Web that has the connection to physicists, having been developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. The Internet is the infrastructure on which the WWW runs, and predates it by a number of years.

    3. “The Internet is the infrastructure on which the WWW runs …”

      You mean what former U.S. Senator Stevens (R-Alaska) identified as “a series of tubes”?

      Anyway, there’s a distinction between technology developed as a tool during a scientific project and the discovery of the object(s) of that project — the distinction, during the Apollo mission, for example, between the discovery of lunar rocks and the discovery of Tang.

  16. Jerry writes:

    Granted, there’s a limit to how much society can afford (the LHC cost about $6 billion dollars to build, and the running expenses are about $25 million per year).

    The F-35 airfleet was grounded today. The F-35 programme was initially budgeted at $400 billion USD. According to Reuters, the Pentagon projects the overall costs of the F-35 programme at $1.45 trillion USD.

    If there’s a limit to how much society can afford to spend, the LHC is peanuts compared to ill-conceived toys like the F-35.

    1. Those F-35 costs are going to impact us down here in Australia too. From a recent TV programme:

      http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2013/02/18/3690317.htm

      “The JSF project could cost Australian taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Is this plane a super fighter or a massive waste of money?”

      As another comparator I came across this, $26.8 brazillion for the new US aircraft carrier:

      http://www.facethefactsusa.org/facts/New-Aircraft-Carrier-Does-More-with-Less-Crew

  17. “The only two human endeavors that are cross-boundary at this massive scale are art and science.”

    How cross-boundary is art? I’m thinking especially of music, where it’s very much a matter not only of personal taste but regional. How many Westerners like listening to gamelan for hours, as Malaysians and Indondesians do, or Chinese opera? What would a Malawian artist make of Mark Rothko? (More than I do, perhaps.)

    1. What about Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven — or Duke, Miles, and Monk?

      As Louie Armstrong said regarding the rousing reception he received as the first jazzman to tour behind the Iron Curtain and across Asia: “Cats is cats, anywhere.”

  18. Check out *Knocking on Heavens Gate *by Lisa Randall,* *the Harvard theoritical physicist and science popularizer. It gets between l 1/2 and 2 thumbs up from reviewers. Among other scientific goodies she treats the LHD in significant detail; also not light reading but as clear as possible for the non-specialist.

  19. Thanks for the recommendation and authors! Added to my Amazon Wish List. I would like to recommend also “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?” by Leon Lederman. It is nicely explained from Greeks physics (ok, I’m being very broad, but we have to admit that they hit on a lot fo very good ideas) to the Higgs and its importance in the Standard Model. Also a sad reading in the sense that Lederman wrote the book to try to convince US Congress not to suspend the SSC project (Superconducting Super Collider). The US Congress suspended the project a few months after the publication of the book (I’m wondering why it is not suspending the F35 project, but I do not vote in US, so I let US citizenships decide on that).

    PD: I do not like the title, but if it wasn’t because we know who-all, it has some poetry in it…

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