God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon Lederman (PDF)

Description

A Nobel Prize–winning physicist’s “funny, clever, entertaining” account of the history of particle physics and the hunt for a Higgs boson (Library Journal). In this extraordinarily accessible and witty book, Leon Lederman—“the most engaging physicist since the late, much-missed Richard Feynman” (San Francisco Examiner)—offers a fascinating tour that takes us from the Greeks’ earliest scientific observations through Einstein and beyond in an inspiring celebration of human curiosity. It ends with the quest for the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God Particle, which scientists hypothesize will help unlock the last secrets of the subatomic universe. This is not only an enlightening journey through baryons and hadrons and leptons and electrons—it also “may be the funniest book about physics ever written” (The Dallas Morning News). “One of the clearest, most enjoyable new science books in years . . . explains the entire history of physics and cosmology. En route, you’ll laugh so hard you won’t realize how much you are learning.” —San Francisco Examiner “The story of the search for the ultimate constituents of matter has been told many times before, but never with more verve and wit. . . . His hilarious account of how he helped persuade President Reagan to approve the construction of the Super Collider is itself worth the price of the book.” —Los Angeles Times

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐It’s a little sad about Leon Lederman. He did win the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the muon neutrino in 1988 and had an illustrious career including director of Fermilab. But his baby that he lobbied so hard for, the Superconducting Supercollider, was canceled by Congress, and he ultimately had to sell his medal for the Nobel Prize to some good samaritan for close to one million dollars to pay his assisted living costs when he developed dementia. Maybe someone might say it was because he included in the title of his book The Name of The Almighty. But Lederman wasn’t the only Nobel Prize winning physicist that had trouble with bills for old age facilities. Burton Richter was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against an exclusive retirement center in Palo Alto; the court held that residents are not legally entitled to recover their entrance fees even if they were so promised in a residency contract, and Richter had put in more than a million and a half dollars. Physics is full of recent tragedies. Lederman himself notes the case of Heinz Pagels, who died in a mountain climbing accident. Princeton physicist Steven Gubser similarly died in a rock climbing accident. Maybe physicists overestimate their abilities. Maybe physicists should avoid rocks. Lederman is really a world-class borscht belt comedian here (not be confused with a contemporaneous Letterman), and one can see how he could be successful given his charming wit and affable appearance in photos of him on Google Chrome. Moreover, Lederman views himself as an experimentalist, and doesn’t take the theory side too seriously. One can understand him as someone who was good with the equipment, firing up the accelerator, getting rid of the bugs, and producing bumps in the data curves to confirm whatever particle the theorists might want to come up with next. Still, the jokes and the cynicism can work against him, and one wonders if he is really a ‘serious man’. The book begins with some personal perspectives when the author was at the top of his game as director of Fermilab, and then a somewhat inane imaginary conversation with Democritus, before recounting the history of physics from Galileo to Rutherford into the origins of quantum mechanics. There are some pretty interesting stories here that you may not have heard before, but it’s nothing that couldn’t be written by any number of people, and maybe even were actually written by the co-author Teresi with the jokes then added later in the margins by Lederman. So, we are now half-way through the book, and still haven’t gotten to anything about the Higgs particle. Then there is another section on the history of accelerators that includes personal recollections of experiments from his younger years by Lederman, and after that there’s a history of the discovery of all of the new particles of quantum mechanics: pions, his role in the parity violation of kaons, the various generations of quarks, and the force-carrying bosons . . . . There is a lot of elementary particle physics covered here along the way, and you can learn a lot if you supplement with reading from Wikipedia. But while there is some early foreshadowing, it is not until the last forty pages, at best, that the book gets into the Higgs particle, and even then this additionally includes the related theories in cosmology. So, the title of the book is a little misleading – like a strip tease by an old person. The Higgs particle is really the keystone for the entire premise of the Standard Model, uniting cosmology and elementary particle physics. If the Higgs particle theory turns or turned out to be wrong, it might be fair to say that the entire edifice of contemporary physics would be overturned. The Higgs particle provides a justification for an ex nihilo creation of the universe from nothing, a path to the unification of all of the three or four forces of nature (maybe you can blame this drive for unification on Einstein), a framework for the expansion of the universe by Dark Energy, and for the creation of all of the elementary particles themselves under the theory of the hot Big Bang. The problem is that the theory itself does not make that much sense if you try to explain it to an ordinary person: a particle or a field that gives other particles mass. There are an increasing number of books written in recent years that question the validity and direction of physics. This appears to have initiated around the turn of the current century when the promises of string theory dissolved into illusion under the weight of a plethora of sub-species of that theory that didn’t appear to converge into anything useful or, in the current lingo, weren’t ‘verifiable’. But quantum mechanics was plagued from the beginning by un-renormalizable infinities, and a game of whack-a-mole where every correct theoretical prediction was accompanied by an incorrect one, and the theories had to be continually modified. Alexander Unzicker’s The Higgs Fake is a slender volume setting forth the author’s rage and frustration at the physics establishment, and could be construed as a bit of a ‘crank’. But let’s give a fair hearing to Unzicker. Lederman himself states that physics should by definition always be open to iconoclasts to make progress, even if he was not enamored of people who tried to turn physics into the mysticism of an anti-science sentiment that characterized the 1990s. Unzicker’s arguments are various, and include those that are philosophical, technical, practical, and proscriptive, but his conclusion appears to be that the Higgs particle, some unspecified theoretical foundation of elementary particle physics, and at least some subset of the allegedly discovered particles are – well, if I used those two words the spam filters might delete my post (if it was mostly hashtags). Many of the points made by Unzicker cannot really be disputed by elementary particle physicists: few if any of these particles are actually detected because only charged particles generally leave any trail in the detectors, and neutral particles do not; the new particles of interest have lives that are so short – sometimes on the order of ten to the minus twenty-fifth seconds – that they’ll never travel fast enough to even appreciably exit the immediate collision zone during that time, let alone to the detectors, and their existence must then in some way be deduced from additional reaction byproducts by the particle physicists using with some speculative theory of what those products should be; that there are simply too many collisions in any given run of the accelerator for any human being to actually look at them – billions or trillions of events –, so a computer has to be programmed to recognize certain ‘triggers’ of the rare events of interest (similar to pattern recognition) to initially cull the data; that every search for a new particle must program the computer to remove ‘background’ so that the ‘triggers’ are set simply to ignore reactions of all of the particles that were already discovered; that the theory never predicts any exact mass of the particle that is supposed to be discovered, so that the accelerator people effectively have to tune through a range of ever-increasing energies to determine bumps in the data that are inferred to correspond to the particles in the same way that you might try to find your radio station by tuning through the dial (“What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”); that the elementary particle physics community is forever looking for accelerators with higher energies, that these accelerators are expensive, the funding is hard to come by, and the pressure to produce results consistent with the theory is considerable. If I could create my own paraphrase of the point made by Unzicker, “If you have a big enough haystack, maybe you could find anything you want to in it.” Moreover, Lederman’s book admits some real problems with mass predictions in the theory. Firstly, if you add up all of the masses of the three component quarks and accompanying gluons (the gluon mass is actually supposed to be zero) of a proton, you only get about one percent of the entire proton’s mass. Now there can then be some complicated mathematical contortion of how to theoretically get the remainder of the proton’s mass from energy that holds the proton together, but if your quark-gluon theory only accounts for one percent of the observable mass of the proton it’s supposed to explain, then how good is that theory? Secondly, there’s the mass of the gluons themselves. Lederman explains how the force carrying particles are predicted to have a high mass in accordance with the uncertainty principle because they act at small distances. So, the masses of the gluons carrying the strong force and the corresponding bosons carrying the weak force should both be heavy. But the gluons actually appear to have no mass even though the bosons of the weak force are pretty massive. Thirdly, there is the aforesaid absence of firm predictions for masses of any of the particles. The Higgs particle itself had to have its mass determined experimentally, as the only thing that was known about it was that its mass should be in a range greater than any prior accelerator had ever tested, which was why the physicists needed a more powerful acceleration. It’s a little ironic, then, that the Higgs particle is used to explain the masses of all the other particles when not even the mass of the Higgs particle could be precisely predicted. Lederman himself cites another physicist as admitting that the Higgs particle was itself designed to sweep all the problems of elementary particle physics under a big rug.If you ask me (not that anybody will), there may be some problem in the quantum field theory of Feynman and Schwinger, where every field is supposed to have a corresponding particle. This is an assumption that never really made any sense to me. Gravity and the electromagnetic force have some superficial similarities because they are both inversely proportional to the square of the distance, they both have a source and a divergence, so that any continuous surface intercepts the same flux at any distance. But the strong force is still not understood, whatever may be analogized by ‘asymptotic freedom’, and the term ‘gluon’ just begs the question of whether this should even be called a force at all. Don’t even get me started on the weak force; one can understand that it has something to do with anything involving neutrinos, but from the theory it could be a force or it could be velcro. Any conventional explanation of quantum mechanics always appears to get hung up on some philosophical problems of the wave-particle duality or the uncertainty principle, with a possible additional digression into quantum entanglement, but what is hidden then is the meaning and origins of the quantum wave equation of Schrodinger and the relativistic wave equation of Dirac. A conventional presentation of the quantum theory then gushes about the brilliance of the equation of Dirac, but does not get into the specifics, and this is really the hard part. I don’t know, but for me, and maybe for members of my generation, it’s not that difficult to understand how something could be a wave and a particle at the same time – it’s mainly a matter of trying to visualize what the equation represents in the same way as a wave equation for light gives a picture of what light is. And we all tend to think more now about the importance of probability in making predictions in an uncertain world, so that if you are familiar with complex numbers then you could see how probabilities can have real and imaginary components. But these pseudo-problems are all just distractions from the real problem. The equations of Schrodinger and Dirac were apparently guessed intuitively by those physicists, and there is nothing that necessarily says that their formulations are optimal. One of the great virtues that is conventionally extolled in the relativistic equation of Dirac is the implication that it accounts for spin, and that spin in quantum mechanics then must be ‘intrinsic’. Now, Dirac’s equation may be an improvement over the equations of Schrodinger and Klein-Gordon, and enables a representation of spin because the equation is actually four equations in the form of a matrix, with two of the four representing two spins and two of the four representing two matter-antimatter states. But the equation of Dirac does not really enable anyone to visualize what is spinning, and physical spin is actually presented by the theory to be a wrong way of thinking.Perhaps you have to assume to some degree that the particle physicists know what they are doing, that they have some idea of what the reactions should look like, and this is not all some big conspiracy, even if there can be some observational bias. That is, we are supposed to assume that there is actually a correlation between the particles predicted by a speculative theory and the particles that are actually indirectly inferred from the patterns of the tracks of the byproducts of the reactions detected by the algorithms used in the triggers of the accelerators. Maybe this might be correct, even if the masses of these particles are not predicted. Who knows, someday we may all have to admit this is true, we will be taught in high school about the Higgs field, just one of the subterranean structures that supports the visible world, and it will all be normal, something that students can’t challenge. Maybe it’s just a really hard problem and we are still in the early stages of solving it. Or maybe there is a better way of discovering the architecture of a house that is the subatomic particles than shooting artillery shells at it and examining the shards of glass, the fragments of bricks, and pieces of pipe of that house in ruins. Still, CERN put out their carefully-worded press release about the discover of something “consistent with the Higgs boson”, and then there was nothing more, perhaps only a proliferation of new Higgs particles at greater masses still to be observed, or supersymmetry. Lederman argues that these new particles actually are ‘seen’, asking the woman if she ever really ‘saw’ the Pope, the woman says she saw him on tv, and Lederman getting into a complicated explanation of signal processing and communication of images, supposing to raise a question about whether you have actually ‘seen’ the Pope, or only some image on the television screen. I’m not sure if this is really convincing because there is a difference between an ordinary person recognizing an image and maybe a highly skilled elementary particle physicist interpreting evidence of tracks and jets in a spark chamber. But maybe you have to trust the physicists; they continue to tell you these stories about popular resistance to physical theories of the past; if you hear a theory enough, maybe you actually have to believe it. Remember that the Internet was invented at CERN. Or maybe that’s all just the rap, a promise for an infinitely-regressive future given so as to continue to get funding, to keep riding the gravy train, like they did for the Tokamak.It’s almost thirty years now from when this book was written by Lederman. Maybe it would be different for him if he had convinced the politicians to build the SSC as an add-on to the existing infrastructure at Fermilab instead of in Texas. But you can’t help seeing him as simply human, a young man who got into grad school at Columbia, at a fortunate time when there was a lot of opportunities opening up in the field of nuclear physics after the War, a young man growing up about to move out of the house of his father, the launderer, to try to make something better of himself, and a young kid riding his bike near the bridge in Soundview.

⭐The book expounds on the history of physics. Even though dated, the information contained is still relevant. A humorous and well written book, without the math and heavy theory, it delivers a wonderful abstract about the particles that make up the entire universe.

⭐When I started to read this book, I wasn’t sure what it would be about. It was basically written to introduce what the SSC, the Superconducting Super Collider, which was being built at the time of writing in Waxahachie, Texas would find; the Higgs boson, also called the God particle or the Goddamm!t particle, if the publisher would have allowed it. Ironically enough, almost simultaneously with the publication of this book, the SSC was cancelled. And to not run out of coincidences, I have started to read this book exactly on the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs particle at CERN (04 July 2012).The book is structured in what I see as three parts. The first one is, normal for physics books, an outline of physical discovery starting with Galileo until today, well, 1993, when the book was published. Then follows a chapter that generally introduces accelerators. And then the standard model of elementary particles and how it was derived is presented. And this part was really a fascinating read. I always wanted to read a book about the standard model; this book absolutely met my expectations. I had at the beginning doubts about its style; trying to make dry jokes. But when the subject started to get quite difficult, I was actually happy with all the interruptions of the seriousness.Firstly, Leon Lederman looks at how the old Greeks thought already about atoms. Even though views of course differed widely, which is no wonder given that the Greeks did no experiments but deduced everything by reason, it is nevertheless astounding that Democritus had already postulated in about 400 BCE that matter is made out of a-toms that are themselves indivisible. He came to this logic by just imagining a knife cutting cheese again and again, cutting off always thinner pieces until at last at the level of the atom, nothing can be cut off anymore. Democritus also postulated that between these atoms, there must exist a void, so that atoms in liquids and gases can move past each other. Even though other ideas of his turned out to be not true, such as that iron atoms have hooks that makes iron solid, his ideas of the atom and the void were way ahead of anything that was known until the 19th century. Just Lederman’s way of presenting this chapter, as a discourse with Democritus, even though I get it where he got the idea from, I had problems getting used to.In the next chapter, Lederman discusses Galileo Galilei, whom he describes as first experimenter, and Isaac Newton, who played a great part in advancing atomism. Galileo performed experiments, maybe not throwing weights from the leaning tower of Pisa, but letting them roll down inclined boards. He so realized that the weights rolled faster and faster, and also that their weights didn’t matter. They arrived at the bottom, excluding resistance and other factors, at the same time. Newton then formulated that any object will only change its motion if a force is applied and that this force is proportional to its mass. This mass is thus a measurement of the inertia of the object in as much as it will resist the force. On the other hand, Newton also formulated the law of gravity, where the strength of the attractive force is proportional to the mass both objects. Here, mass is a measurement of how much an object will attract the another one, and the two masses have been determined to be the same. Therefore, when an object falls, the force that pulls it down is proportional to its mass, but its inertia is also proportional to its mass. Therefore, the two effects cancel out and objects of different masses will hit the ground at the same time. Other interesting points in this chapter were for me on the one hand the realization that Galileo died the same year that Newton was born, 1642. This was intriguing for me to contemplate, as for me, Galileo had always been a man of the extended Middle Ages, with him being trialed by the inquisition and such, whereas Newton was a man of the early modern age. That they have lifted back-to-back, I had not realized before. On the other hand, I liked Lederman’s statement, “60 kilograms or, in the nations of low culture, not yet in the metric system, 132 pounds”.Then, Lederman shows how the chemists subsequently advanced our understanding of atoms. After Lavoisier had collected, organized and systematized all the current chemical knowledge and contributed his own, such as demonstrating that no element is transmuted, Lederman says, he was the Newton of chemistry, John Dalton, a schoolteacher, realized that hydrogen and oxygen always reacted in a ratio of 2:8 and postulated elements consisting of atoms that reacted with each other. Soon more and more elements were discovered, which led Mendeleev to realize that certain characters repeat in a periodical fashion and postulate that some atoms had not even been discovered yet. Next in the chapter Lederman returns to the physicists where Faraday as experimenter and then Maxwell as theorist with Faraday’s results realized that electricity and magnetism can be unified in electromagnetism, that the electromagnetic force exerts its effect at the speed of light, and that this happens through electromagnetic waves, but it was Hertz who synthesized from Maxwell’s pages-long results the four equations of electromagnetism. Thompson then demonstrated that the cathode ray consisted of negative charged particles that were 2000 to 4000 times lighter than hydrogen. Atoms were thus not indivisible.The discovery of spectral lines in the sunlight and in the fire while burning elements posed also a problem, as it hinted at a structure inside atoms. Planck realized while analyzing black body radiation that light is emitted only in quanta, and that as energy is proportional to the wavelength of light, not much ultraviolet light will be emitted as the wavelength is too energy-rich. Einstein then used this realization to explain the photoelectric effect, in that photons that are enough energy-rich can strike out electrons from metal atoms. And Rutherford by shooting alpha particles at gold foils and seeing a small proportion of it reflected established that the nucleus inside the atom is very small, compared to the whole atom. Bohr eventually used these finding and analyzing for hydrogen postulated that only certain orbits were allowed and that electrons change orbit when they adsorb or emit light. Further findings let to the additions to Bohr’s model, such as that electrons must be traveling at a fraction of light so that the theory of relativity must be applied for them and that they must possess a spin. However, the model turned out to be wrong. De Broglie postulated that electrons would, just like light, display particle and wave behavior. This made it possible to postulate the allowed orbits as the ones with multitudes of the wavelengths, so that the orbit would represent a standing wave. However, Heisenberg didn’t like the visualization of orbits, introduced his so-called “matrix mechanics” and said that they were visualizable. Schrödinger formulated his wave equation, saying that all matter is waves, matter waves. Born then insisted that Schrödinger’s equation did not represent matter waves, but the probability of finding a particle at various locations. Dirac then while trying to combine quantum theory with the special theory of relativity discovered that there are always two solutions to the equation, as the square root of a number can be positive and negative. The name antimatter came up and the positron, identical to the electron but with a positive charge, was soon discovered. Heisenberg again thereafter postulated his uncertainty principle that we cannot know the exact location and motion (or momentum) of a particle at the same time. And to close, Pauli formulated his exclusion principle: Only 1 electron and 1 more with opposite spin can occupy any orbital. The electron(s) in the outmost orbital define the chemical behavior of an atom.The following chapter introduces, also very important for the subject of this book, particles accelerators and their history since Rutherford had shoot alpha particles on gold foil. Therefore, here cyclotrons and synchrotrons are discussed, as well as the detectors, where originally cloud chambers were used, then bubble champers and then proportional wire champers, until, at the time of writing of the book, complex detectors with exquisitely designed configurations of wires and scintillation counters were used. On the one hand, I found myself thinking this chapter must be boring, with so many technical details being explained, but on the other hand, I was impressed how the chapters actually intrigued me, and I quite enjoyed reading all the technicalities.After a short interlude, in which Lederman narrates how he and two collaborators had shown parity violation in early 1957 (Basically that our physics are not mirror symmetric, but that we would notice if we would live in a mirror universe), the next chapter then turns the discussion on what results were actually obtained using the accelerators. Lederman shows in the 1950 and 60s, hundreds of hadrons were discovered, which seemed to complicate the physics of elementary particles again. Paul Dirac had formulated quantum electrodynamics (QED) when he had combined quantum theory with electromagnetism, but when it was applied to calculate the electron’s mass, it resulted in infinity. As this is not the case in the physical world, the equations were “renormalized” by inserting the electron’s actual mass into the equations. This worked to bypass, not solve, the problem. The weak force is introduced. It was postulated in 1933 by Enrico Fermi. It enables otherwise stable hadrons to decay. A free neutron is energy-richer than a proton, and therefor can decay, the proton however not. In a nucleus, on the other hand, it might be that a proton is now energy-richer, and it can therefore decay into a neutron. The weak force was recognized to violate not only parity (P) symmetry, but also charge (C) symmetry. The weak force thus differentiated between matter and antimatter. It was then postulated that CP symmetry would be maintained, until it was shown in 1964 that CP was not perfect either. This slightly broken CP symmetry was responsible that after the Big Bang, some matter was left. The beta decay of a neutron would result in a proton and a beta particle, later recognized to be an electron. However, when the energy of beta decays was calculated, there was some energy missing, which led Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to postulate another particle that does not interact with anything expect through the weak force. It was later called neutrino, little neutron, to differentiate it from the neutron and detected more than twenty years later.Lederman now tells the story how he and two collaborators build a pion beam, which would decay into a muon, a heavy electron, and a neutrino, which, when all other decay products would be filtered out by meter-thick steel wall, would result in a neutrino beam, which could then be used in experiments. They also discovered that these neutrinos in their detector, where they were made to collide with aluminum nucleus, only resulted again in muons, but never in electrons. Therefore, these neutrinos must remember the muon, they were thus distinct from neutrinos that would result in beta decays and were called muon neutrinos. The hundreds of hadrons that had been discovered were organized according to their different features, such as spin, charge, and so on, called according to their quantum number. And like with the elements, where periodic repetitions of features indicated at the underlying organization within the atom, the pattern of arranged hadrons also screamed for substructure. Therefore, three quarks were postulated; up, down and strange, and their antiquarks. There are two classes of hadrons, baryons, consisting of three quarks, including protons and neutrons, and mesons, consisting of two quarks. When all the properties of the quarks were adjusted for just a few of the baryons, it was found that the properties fitted to the hundreds of hadrons. Still, it was impossible to see a quark, as the energy required to separate them increased with their distance. So, what was done to determine the existence of quarks was the same as Rutherford has done previously with the nucleus. Electrons were shot on protons and their exiting energy and angle measured. This experiment led to the conclusion that quarks are pointlike substructures in the proton. When further experiments were done, Lederman points out by himself again and by two collaborators in 1968, their results proved too equivocal to publish, but in 1974 similar experiments at Stanford and Brookhaven led to the discovery of a new particle at 3.105 GeV, called by Stanford psi, by Brookhaven J, and the community J/Psi. The unusual thing about the J/Psi is that it had a relatively long lifetime, something prevented it from decaying. It was eventually established that the J/Psi was a charm quark/anti-charm quark. With the establishment of the charm quark, a fourth quark had been found. This provided also an overwhelming proof for the existence of quarks. In 1975, the tau particle, a heavier cousin of the electron and the muon was discovered, and the tau neutrino postulated. Then, as the 400 GeV Fermilab became available, a particle at 9.5 GeV, the upsilon, consisting of a bottom and an anti-bottom quark was found in 1977. A corresponding top quark was postulated as well, but, like the tau neutrino, not discovered at the time of writing. It was discovered in 1995, the tau neutrino in 2000.Revisiting the weak force, it was recognized that three messenger particles are carrying it; W+, a W− and a Z0. A positive and a negative charged particle are necessary, as the charge from the decaying neutron has to be carried to the electron, resp. from the anti-neutron to the positron. As it became clear that the week force is also involved in neutral interactions, a neutral particle or neutral current was required as well. These particles are relatively heavy, as they only interact over short distances. The photon is massless; therefore, electromagnetism reaches out to infinity. The weak force was modeled like electromagnetism (QED) in a field theory, however, whereas QED had to be renormalized, the field theory of the weak force could not be made to work, due to infinities. Then, weak force and electromagnetism were unified, using gauge symmetry, and only when this symmetry is broken, do the weak force and electromagnetism appear. And how is the symmetry broken? Because W+, a W− and a Z0 interact with another particle. For the strong force, the gluon is the messenger particle that binds quarks together. The strong force gets weaker, the closer two quarks come to each other. Therefore, gauge symmetry could be applied here as well. Color was introduced as analog to the electric charge, and quarks were established to come in three colors; red, blue and green, and with this Pauli’s exclusion principle could be applied: only quarks that add up to white can bind, and therefore, either three quark baryons are allowed, or quark and anti-quark mesons, where the colors cancel each other out. Gluons were recognized to carry two colors, a color and another anti-color and in emissions and absorptions of quarks, they change their colors. Correspondingly, there are eight different quarks. The field theory for quarks was called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the strong force between protons and neutrons was recognized as residual effect of the quark gluon interactions. Therewith, the standard model was almost completed.In the next chapter, the discovery of the W+, W− and Z0 bosons at CERN in 1983 is presented, with the W bosons having 79.3 (since 2022: 80.4) and the Z boson 91.2 GeV. No top quark/anti-top quark meson was seen in these experiments, which implied that the mass of the top quark must be more than half that of the Z0 (> 45 GeV), otherwise top and anti-top mesons would have occurred in the experiment. When it was eventually discovered in 1995, it was measured at 172 GeV. Moreover, by measuring the width of the Z0 mass distribution, it was also determined that there could be no fourth generation of particles. If there were, the Z0 boson would also decay into the fourth-generation neutrino and anti-neutrino, adding another decay mode, and thereby shortening its lifetime. And the lifetime of a particle it reflected in the width of its mass distribution. Furthermore, Lederman states that at the time of writing, the top quark was being searched for at Fermilab and that it was estimated to be at least 91GeV. Thank internet and Wikipedia, I can now check that the top quark was measured at 172.8 GeV. He says, we still don’t understand how these parameters came to be, as we don’t understand what happened directly after the Big Bang. We need a unification of gravity with quantum theory, but none has materialized so far. Moreover, when the standard model is calculated through with increasing energies, eventually mathematically inconsistent, nonsensical effects result. This suggests that we are missing something at higher energies, something we can ignore at normal energies. And this might be the Higgs field and particles that give mass to massless particles. Different particles interact differently with the Higgs field. W+, W−, Z0 and photons were the original carriers of the electroweak force. Along came Higgs and broke the symmetry, or, as Lederman prefers, hid it. W+, W− and Z0 are now fat, and because of this, the weak force is weak. Moreover, the standard model suffers from a unitarity crisis; more than 100% of particles are predicted, at the energy of 1 TeV, unless there is a neutral, heavy particle there that would avoid disaster. This is the Higgs boson. In a philosophical digression, Leo Lederman bemoans that the aether, that has been replaced with nothingness, has now been replaced again by the Higgs field. The rest of the chapter discusses again how Lederman managed to get the SSC approved (which was canceled again when the book was published…).And in the last chapter, Lederman now quickly introduces GUTs, supersymmetry and superstrings. GUTs (grand unification theories) predict that the electroweak and the strong force are unified at 10^15 GeV. Some GUTs predict the decay of protons, which has not been observed yet. Supersymmetry predict that all know particles have super-symmetric partners, none of which have been observed yet. And superstrings are a multitude of string theories, where the vibration of strings at the Planck length leads to our particles. String theories do not yet make measurable predictions. He then goes on to discuss dark matter and the idea at that time that the universe was flat, that it would thus not keep expanding or start contracting again, ending in a Big Crunch. The calculated mass of the universe was too close to a flat universe that it was believed to be a coincidence. Only afterwards was dark energy discovered and the ever-expanding universe established. Inflation was proposed to explain why there are no magnetic monopoles. Later it was recognized that inflation also explains quite some other stuff, such as why the microwave background radiation is so equally distributed. And causing agent for inflation was… the Higgs field that gave the early universe so much energy to expand rapidly. Coming back to Democritus, the Greek philosopher carries Lederman to the future. But as is usual with forecasts that involve the future, Ledermans’s prediction for the future were way off. Room-temperature superconductors in 1997, world peace and virtual-reality helmets in 2020, The New World Accelerator in Teheran, and the Higgs boson at 422 GeV (It was measured at 125 GeV, exactly ten years ago).

⭐I have recently read “The God Particle” by Professor Leon Lederman, and can truthfully say I was disappointed, that is disappointed when I came to the end of the book. this book is a great read for anybody who is interested in the development of scientific discovery into the the basic particles which make up the atoms of our universe, and thus ourselves.While following the route through history, one is shown the important steps that were discovered both by design and by accident, by such great Physicists as galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Feynman, Lederman, Higgs and many many more, whose names I cannot recall .The end point of the book is the search for and discovery of the ultimate particle “The God Particle”,or “Higgs Boson” , which is thought to be the final particle, which will make the Quantum Equation make complete sense (well almost). Professor Lederman leads the reader along with style and panache, and plenty of laugh out loud humour, so much so, that when Icame to the end of the book , I was disappointed , though at the same time elated, and with a much greater understanding of particle physics than I had before, I read the book. Lederman ensures that fact and supposition are clearly defined, and that even if the Higgs Boson is found, the story of Physics will not end there,but will have travelled one more step on the road to enlightenment. I must also say that I had previously read Professor Brian Cox’s ” Why does E=MC2″, and so had a reasonable grounding in particle physics ( as much as could be expected of a layman!). Another great read, recommended by a fellow Yahoo “ranter” after the CERN announcement last summer, that they may have found the “Higgs Bosun”.Long Live scientific discovery , and the search for truth!

⭐I am half way through this excellent well put together book on the so called”God Particle” and I am still confused about what it is ( even they dont know) I recently watched a TV programme about this subject made in 2016 and they still dont know what it is or if it exist,???? perhaps God does ?

⭐A great read. Funny, clever and by far the best book to learn and enjoy particle physics.

⭐Interesting book

⭐Thank you

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