Customer Reviews

The Particle Garden: Our Universe As Understood By Particle Physicists (Helix Books)

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is specifically a book on the standard model of particle physics. Gordon Kane doesn't digress to other areas of physics and keeps himself doggedly to the subject. This in a way keeps the book brief and makes it more of a summary than a detailed treatment of the standard model.

So readers curious about the ultimate building blocks of matter (quarks and leptons) and the interactions between them (gauge bosons) will definitely benefit from this book. Kane also gives a brief account of the different accelerators and colliders engaged in testing the standard model and detecting the various quarks, leptons and bosons as predicted by the standard model(which until now has come out with flying colors, making it one of the most successful, well tested and mathematically rigorous theories yet). Kane also discusses the Higgs mechanism, which is responsible for imparting mass to the particles. This is still an active research area and the race is still on to detect the Higgs boson, which is a quantum of the Higgs field - in the bigger colliders such as the Tevatron collider in Fermilab and the LEP in CERN. If the results are still negative then the focus will shift to the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN which will start operating in 2005. Other areas of discussion in this book is the extended model of the Standard Theory like supersymmetric standard theory, CP violation, dark matter, baryon asymmetry etc...

Readers will greatly benefit if they could visit this web site - http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/index.html - which I think provides a great and excellent introduction to the standard model and will complement "the particle garden". Also recommended is John Gribbin's - "Q is for Quantum - an encyclopedia of particle physics", which will definitely prove to be an invaluable source for anything and everything you wanted to know about particle physics.

The book is a bit dated(1996) and lacks charts and particle interactions equations which, I think, should have been provided appropriately to help the readers get a more better grasp on the subject and make it a more enjoyable learning experience. Apart from this grievance, Kane does a pretty good job of teaching and explaining the wonderful and complex world of particle physics.

This is a very good book both for the layman and for physics undergraduate majors such as myself who have forgotten most of what they learned 20 years ago. In addition...without using any sophisticated math it explains basic concepts of particle physics and also presents the latest theories and discoveries. It is certainly too basic for current graduate level physics students, but for the overwhelming majority of people this book gives a wonderful overview of a fascinating field of science. Those with any curiosity concerning physics should enjoy this book.

When reading books about Chemistry or Physics, the level of depth is usually to the electron, proton, neutron, and there is usually some mention of quarks and antimatter and dark matter, but with no explanation of where these ideas are coming from. This book gives a good, nonmathematical description of the Standard Theory (Model) of particle physics, which gives a good account of what particles are known, how forces are treated using particles called Bosons. The books will answer any questions about what is known, but without proofs. I plan to study physics as an undergrad, and probably grad too, and have always been attracted to learning about the fundamental particles. This book was very satisfying for me, and will be for other interested students. Kane provides information about not only the standard theory, but also the facilities where research is done, where the field is going, and what a future student can expect. A quick read and definitely worth the time!

This is the best introduction to particle physics that I know of. It's very clear, and you can read the book in one or two days. Not only particles are described, but also their interactions, the theories, the experiments, the physicists that work on them, and even a bit of philosophy of science.

The world of particle physics may seem strange and unusual to most, but after reading _The Particle Garden_, any reader with even a slight interest will be left with a deeper understanding of the fundamental workings of our universe.

This book differs from most other similar works by focusing much more on the current state of particle physics; too many other books, which claim to be introductions to the subject, spend at least eighty percent of their space on the history aspects of physics.

_The Particle Garden_ differs in this respect by educating the reader as to the realities of the topic in the 1990s, including such recent and advanced topics as CP symmetry violation.

As an added treat, any young individuals who might be considering a career in the sciences will undoubtedly enjoy Cane's chapter "Doing Particle Physics: The care and feeding of a Particle physicist . . ."

In short, if you are interested in any sort of physics, or what to know what a particle physicist really does for a living, or even if you just want a more thorough understanding of how the universe works, Kane's _The Particle Garden_ is a must read.

Eric Jonas eric-j@primenet.com

A very good book describing the search for fundamental particles and a theory to unify the four known forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong). Dr. Kane takes a philisopical approach at times, such as when he describes the three different ways in which we "understand" things. He provides an adequate history of particle physics but does not dwell on it, instead focusing on progress made to date. I found the book very enjoyable to read.

There must a need out there for a good book about particle physics for the layman. It's such an important topic and with the prominence of the LHC in the news, you would think publishers would be striving to produce a book which is accessible, well-written, and richly illustrated. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be such a book out there.

This is the closest that I've found to that ideal. It's well written and covers the standard model effectively. It presents sufficient historical context to help the reader understand the relevance of the concepts, and the chapters on the experimental side of the particle physics were very helpful in tying the ideas to empirical evidence. The discussion of string theory was just enough to let the reader know of its relevance, and the epistemology discussions were a welcome diversion from dry scientific topics.

But, like other books on the topic, it would benefit from better illustrations. After all, symmetry is important to the standard model and naturally lends itself well to illustration, along the lines of what you would find in a Scientific American article. I'm still waiting for a good book for the layman on particle physics, but so far, this is the best I've seen.

This book concisely brings together vast amounts of knowledge on the Standard Model and theoretical extensions of the Standard Model including supersymmetry, Higgs Boson particles, grand unification, quantum gravity, etc. There are many charts in the book that make excellent reference material. Even advanced topics are very easy to understand.

This is a pretty good book, but I'm still trying to work out just what audience it is best suited for.

How about a bright high school freshman, one who hasn't taken physics or even advanced algebra yet? Or perhaps someone a bit older who never took much mathematics. This book really does not require much (if any) math.

That might be good. Such a person might want to know about elementary particles. They're fascinating. And they are the building blocks of matter.

The book starts with an explanation of what particles are, a little history of particle physics, and (here's what a high school student might want to know) some description of what it is like to become a particle physicist: you go to college, you go to graduate school, you become a post-doc, you stay at a university, where you work on experiments or do theory, or maybe you just give up and get a job on Wall Street.

Then there is a description of the standard model, with the quantum numbers for the particles we know about. The Higgs boson is added to the list, even though it has not been discovered. And there is a discussion of high energy experiments, and plenty about that Higgs boson.

And there's material about supersymmetry and a little about cosmology.

There are a couple of appendices. One has a few pages on Feynman diagrams. Okay, that may confuse some readers but it is just an appendix. I'd leave it in. Another mentions internal symmetries. Here, I think some diagrams showing a few SU(3) multiplets wouldn't have hurt, but I guess Kane figured that telling about the families of leptons and quarks was enough.

In short, it is a good choice for the audience I mentioned. I just wish it had a little more in it. What's there gives a reader a good idea about why some folks find so much beauty and fascination in this field.

This is one of the many books on various disciplines of science which I bought between 2001-3. I bought this one in December 2001, but I didn't actually read it until March 2006. In this well-written volume on particle physics, Kane does more than the regular review of the particles that physics now considers make up the known universe.

He portrays an understandable history of discovery that clarifies some of the conceptions that seem muddled in either technical writing or the popular magazine portrayals of physics and theories of the universe. And Kane does not rest on the bare presentation of the chronological story of discovery. He evaluates each new level of discovery in light of the meaning for our understanding of the universe and how that contributes to our practical lives.

He deals with implications from these discoveries for our concepts of knowledge, how we learn, how we organize this new information, and how we integrate knowledge from this minute particle level of existence to our macro level of participation in the world around us. This book in a good contribution to the philosophy of knowledge, Epistemology.

Kane deals with concepts of understanding and verification procedures, which provides some reference points for epistemology on the wider basis. This is particularly pertinent in our current post-information age, when the various disciplines seem scattered and separated, due to the simply overwhelming volume of all that is known, all there is to know now, and all that this knowledge has pointed out needing to be yet investigated.

He addresses some points related to the boundaries and abilities of mythical, or religious, or mystical, points of view and the seemingly similar ideas presented nowadays by theoretical physics. This should be helpful for clarifying processes of knowing and validity of claims to knowledge.