Customer Reviews

Quarks and Gluons: A Century of Particle Charges

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i have just finished reading Quarks and Gluons and thought it was terrific: clean, clear, focussed,tightly organized, at a perfect general reader level with a neat colloquial bite to the style, very informative for me with a lot of ahahs-that's -why- they- do- that- , clearly a labor of love by a major contributor in particle physics.

Moo Young Han, a professor at Duke, must be a great teacher, and this book gives everyone the chance to share in the excitement and wonder of particle physics. Han can make all those esoteric terms like quark, meson, lepton, and neutrino meaningful and interesting, which is no small feat. I finally understand how all the particles relate to each other and the larger universe, and enjoyed reading the book in the process.

We found this book to be excellent for those people with some scientific training or interest, to learn about particle physics. It's written in such a style that people will want to keep on reading it and not put it down.

A number of books for the educated layman have been written explaining the fundamental concepts of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This book is one of the very best. Prof. Han has taken a historical time-line approach to introducing the reader to the theory and experiment of quarks and leptons, and their force carrier particles gluons, and the weak gauge bosons. This book utilizes a superb combination of text, tables, and diagrams to illustrate the author's points. Han's book has two particularly well-written narratives. The first is his lucid discussion of the chromo or 'color charge' in hadron formation, and the second is a presentation of conservation or zero-sum attributes of particles in collision. All introductory works explain, for example, that a proton is two up and one down quark. Han goes beyond that to invoke the need for color neutrality of red, green, and blue. Zero-sum conservation is found in few other books at this level. Han uses simple accounting tables to keep track of electric, nucleonic, leptonic, color, and baryonic 'charge'. Using these simple concepts the fact that beta decay must produce not a neutrino, but an anti-neutrino makes perfect sense. Han restricts his purview to just the fundamentals of the Standard Model. Anti-matter is discussed, but there are no excursions into string theory, supersymmetry, or even the Higgs boson. The historical time-line essentially ends with the confirmation of the top quark in 1995 at Fermilab. Nonetheless, this book is lucid, well-written and often witty. It is an outstanding intro to particle physics for the non-physicist.

Quarks and Gluons: A Century of Particle Charges

In the past atoms were the building blocks of matter. Then we realized that atoms were composed of protons, neutrons and an outer shell of electrons. This realization gave us a comprehensive understanding of the workings of nature.

Then we delved even deeper into things, and tiny though protons and neutrons are, we managed to work out that they were composed of even tinier entities called quarks held together my bosons called gluons. It is indeed a compliment to human ingenuity that we were able to do this and derive a model for it called the Standard Model.

The collection of particles and forces that make up this Model are described in an excellent, easy to read manner, in this book. But even though it is a very readable book, it deals with the themes of quarks and gluons, in a quite comprehensive way. The use of graphs and mathematics is non existent i.e. the presentation is mainly textual, but in spite of that, a good understanding of what is happening at the most fundamental level in nature can be obtained by reading this book.

This reviewer highly recommends it.

This is a very interesting book in QP. The content is very well organized for someone with some physics background but want to know more about QP. I highly recommended this book to everyone interest in QP, but don't know where to start. Its also good for someone want to know more about Quarks.

This book was so fascinating that I could not take a break from reading it. I look forward to reading Dr. Han's books The Secret Life of Quanta and The Probably Universe.

Owning several books on quantum physics I found this to be the most clearly written on the subject. All the terms are explained in a succint manner devoid of all verbiage. Very focused writing and I highly recommend it.