The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World [Hardcover]

Sean Carroll (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 13, 2012 | ISBN-10: 0525953590 | ISBN-13: 978-0525953593 | Edition: First Edition

Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: the Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event.

The Higgs boson is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this search has now cost over $9 billion and required the collaboration of engineers from more than one hundred countries.

What is so special about the Higgs boson? We didn’t really know for sure if anything at the subatomic level had any mass at all until we found it. The fact is, while we have now essentially solved the mass puzzle, there are things we didn’t predict and possibilities we haven’t yet dreamed. A doorway is opening into the mind boggling, somewhat frightening world of dark matter. We only discovered the electron just over a hundred years ago and considering where that took us—from nuclear energy to quantum computing--the inventions that will result from the Higgs discovery will be world-changing.

The Particle at the End of the Universe not only explains the importance of the Higgs boson but also the Large Hadron Collider project itself. Projects this big don’t happen without a certain amount of conniving, dealing, and occasional skullduggery— and Sean Carroll explores it all. This is an irresistible story (including characters now set to win the Nobel Prize among other glories) about the greatest scientific achievement of our time.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The science is authoritative, yet bold and lively.  The narrative is richly documented, yet full of human drama.    Carroll’s saga pulls you aboard a modern voyage of discovery.”

—Frank Wilczek, Nobel Laureate, author of The Lightness of Being

“In this superb book, Sean Carroll provides a fascinating and lucid look at the most mysterious and important particle in nature, and the experiment that revealed it.   Anyone with an interest in physics should read this, and join him in examining the new worlds of physics to which this discovery may lead.”

—Leonard Mlodinow, author of NYT bestseller The Drunkard’s Walk

"Carroll tells the story of the particle that everyone has heard of but few of us actually understand. After you read his book—an enticing cocktail of personal anecdote, clever analogy, and a small dose of mind-bending theory—you will truly grasp why the Higgs boson has been sought after for so long by so many. Carroll is a believer in big science asking big questions and his beliefs are infectious and inspiring."

—Morgan Freeman, Actor and Executive Producer of Through the Wormhole

"Carroll is a sure-footed guide through some of the most perplexing and fascinating insights of modern physics."-Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe

(Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe )

"[Carroll's] writing is accessible and peppered with cultural refernces... but don't be fooled Carroll isn't afraid to wade into topics that have befuddled even brand-name physicists."-Wired

(Wired )

"Carroll keeps it real, getting at the complex guts of cutting-edge cosmology in discussions that will challenge fans of Hawking's A Brief History of Time."-The Washington Post

(The Washington Post )

About the Author

Sean Carroll, PhD, is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. After receiving his doctorate at Harvard, he pursued his research at MIT, the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago. Also the author of From Eternity to Here, he lives in Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; First Edition edition (November 13, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525953590
• ISBN-13: 978-0525953593
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (84 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Nuclear Physics > Particle Physics
  • #3 in Books > Science & Math > Experiments, Instruments & Measurement > Experiments & Projects

More About the Author

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, specializing in cosmology, gravitation, field theory, and quantum mechanics. His research addresses the foundations of cosmology: What happened at the very beginning of the universe? Why was entropy low near the Big Bang? Is there an interpretation of quantum mechanics that applies to the universe as a whole? What are the dark matter and dark energy that dominate the universe today? How do complex structures evolve over time?

Carroll has been blogging regularly since 2004. His textbook "Spacetime and Geometry" has been adopted by a number of universities for their graduate courses in general relativity. He is a frequent public speaker, and has appeared on TV shows, such as The Colbert Report and Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. He has produced a set of lectures for The Teaching Company on dark matter and dark energy, and another on the nature of time. He has served as a science consultant for films such as Thor and TRON: Legacy, as well as for TV shows such as Fringe and Bones. His 2010 popular book, "From Eternity to Here," explained the arrow of time and connected it with the origin of our universe.

"The Particle at the End of the Universe," about the Large Hadron Collider and the quest to discover the Higgs boson, was released November 2012. A TV special for NOVA on PBS, based in part on the book, is currently in development. Look for that in 2013.

More information at Carroll's web site, http://preposterousuniverse.com/

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

225 of 232 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sparkling account of the hunting of the Higgs November 13, 2012

By A. Jogalekar TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Many of us remember where we were during key world events; particle physicists would likely remember where they were on July 4, 2012. That was the day the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. By any measure it was one of the most momentous discoveries in physics, perhaps in all of science. But what exactly is the Higgs boson? Why is it important? And how was it discovered? In this engaging and informative book Caltech physicist Sean Carroll sheds light on all these aspects of the Higgs discovery.

Carroll's book can be roughly divided into three parts. In the first part, after giving us a brief overview of particle physics describing relativity, quantum mechanics, the Standard Model and the discovery of the twelve elementary particles that make up the universe, Carroll plunges into a description of the giant particle accelerators that have made possible our understanding of nature's fundamental building blocks. Personally I found this part most enjoyable, since it's a little more accessible than the theoretical part. Carroll tells us about the stupendous engineering challenges involved in the building of the LHC and takes us on a nice little tour of its interior. There's all kinds of fascinating and amusing stuff here; the lead tungstate crystals in the detectors that took ten years to grow, the earlier particle accelerator whose workings were affected by the moon's tides, the baguette dropped by a bird that temporarily created electrical problems, the helium "explosion" caused by high voltage that crippled the machine for months, the physicist whose face was exposed to an intense beam of protons and who still escaped relatively unscathed. The sheer size and complexity of the ten-thousand pound detectors - ATLAS and CMS - beggar belief and the smooth functioning of these hunks of metal, plastic and electronics is a resounding tribute to human ingenuity and collaboration. Carroll is very good at describing the structure and function of the marvelous machines that made the Higgs possible and again confirms the fact that the best science involves both great intellectual ideas and world-class engineering. Many of the LHC's components as well as the principal players are illustrated in color photographs in the center of the book.

Carroll also gives us a lucid account of the statistical methods and data collection techniques used to confirm the discovery of particles. The sheer amount of data collected by the LHC is staggering; as Carroll puts it, enough to fill about a thousand terabyte hard-drives per second. He does a good job detailing the great difficulty of collecting the data from an incredibly complex dance of particle collisions and most importantly, of separating the signal from the noise. He tells us about the almost mythical "5-sigma" threshold, essentially a very stringent statistical test that allows you to claim a "discovery" of a new particle. In July 2012, data from both the ATLAS and CMS detectors was combined together to claim a 5-sigma threshold. Carroll who was in the audience when the discovery was announced captures well the excitement in Geneva and around the world as an intensely international collaboration of more than three thousand LHC-related scientists tuned in to hear the groundbreaking news. This was definitely the discovery of a lifetime, and Peter Higgs was in the audience to hear about it. Yet Carroll drives home the point that statistics is not everything, and illustrates this through the cautionary tale of the discovery of "faster-than-light" neutrinos which, although statistically significant, turned out to be incorrect.

The second part of the book gives us the theoretical basis of the Higgs boson. To Carroll's credit, he spends a fair amount of time dispelling the simplistic belief that the "Higgs boson gives everything mass" and does a pretty good job leading us through the subtleties of what's called the "Higgs field" and exactly how it's relevant to particles masses and interactions. He also addresses the common misunderstanding that most of the mass of an everyday object comes from the Higgs. It doesn't; it comes from the strong interactions and therefore won't suddenly disappear if the Higgs boson were to hypothetically vanish. Along the way Carroll explains important concepts like spontaneous symmetry breaking and Feynman diagrams which are integral to understanding the Higgs mechanism. The last part of the book also has interesting discussions on the potential implications of the Higgs for understanding dark matter, dark energy and the Big Bang. And an amusing chapter lays to rest the slightly paranoid "end-of-world" scenarios postulated before the LHC went online. This same chapter also takes a thoughtful look at the public promotion of science and addresses the role of blogs and other media which communicate science, often correctly but sometimes prematurely. Carroll makes us appreciate the fact that scientists have to tread a fine line in being accurate while still not giving the media an opportunity to sensationalize their findings.

Finally in the third part, Carroll sheds light on the human aspect of science. Part of this is in the earlier chapters where he details the political jockeying and the clash of personalities that was involved in the cancellation of the high-stakes Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) project during the 90s. The fact is that these days even the most fundamental curiosity-driven research can involve billion-dollar equipment like the LHC. Carroll wonders whether governments around the world will now support these increasingly expensive endeavors, especially during times of recession, but also underscores the importance of this research for human creativity and unexpected practical spinoffs (like the World Wide Web). The human aspect of science is also revealed in a separate chapter that among other things asks who would get the Nobel Prize for the discovery. There is no doubt that somebody should get it (and almost universal consensus that Higgs should be included), but the history that Carroll describes makes it clear that at least six people came up with various parts of the idea within a narrow time frame. And the experimentalists seem to deserve it as much as the theoreticians. One thing is certain; any Nobel Prize for the Higgs is going to be at least somewhat controversial.

In general I greatly enjoyed reading "The Particle at the End of the Universe". It's engaging and an easy read and would complement similar other volumes like Ian Sample's "Massive" (which focuses more on the human side) and Frank Close's "The Infinity Puzzle" (which is heavier on the science). Carroll is a pleasant, informative, patient and humorous guide on our tour of the LHC and the Higgs. He is also measured and tends to temper the enthusiasm of discovery with realism; for instance he makes it clear that the discovery of the Higgs still leaves many questions unanswered, and it has no impact on other outstanding scientific problems like discovering cancer drugs or understanding the economy. What Carroll does manage to communicate is the deep satisfaction of discovery, the thrill of the chase and the astonishing achievements that human imagination and skill can make possible.

70 of 75 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great read November 13, 2012

By Shane Anthony Pitts

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Sean Carroll is a great writer, with his own brand of penmanship. He elegantly introduces particle physics without the mathematical jargon that can be confusing to some scientifically illiterate readers, which is a good thing if his goal is to explicate this topic to the masses. It does contain some repetitive info though, especially if you have already browsed through a bunch theoretical physics books. However, Sean Carroll's book does have an advantage, since the discovery of the particle, that seems to be the Higgs boson, was just around the corner. If you are interested in particle physics, amazed by the standard model's newly discovered member, and eager to fill your curiosity bucket with as much information as possible, than this book is a must read for you.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An effective menu of the particle zoo November 29, 2012

By Dan F. Duda

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Sean Carroll is clearly one of the giants in his ability to make comprehensible the incomprehensible world of particle physics. In terms of cataloguing and explaining the fields, forces and matter (and their relationships) that make up reality, this is the ultimate work that I've read so far (at least for those of us not in the particle physics profession). And importantly, we need to remember that this is an area of science in the process of very rapid evolution. That brings us to one of the major themes of the book. Carroll does an excellent job presenting the history and the ongoing research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) including the critical search for the illusive Higg's Boson. A word of caution: don't skip the appendices.

I'd have to rate this an "important read" for anyone obsessed with understanding what existence is all about. Not surprisingly it doesn't have the answer, but it does help explain the process and the path science is on to reach that goal.