Customer Reviews

Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos

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Knowledgably written Don Lincoln (an experimental physicist and staff member of the world's premier particle physics laboratory), Understanding The Universe From Quarks To The Cosmos provides the nonspecialist general reader with a fascinating and informative introduction to the complex world of quarks, leptons, and the forces that govern particle physics. Written especially to introduce lay readers to subatomic mysteries, Understanding The Universe From Quarks To The Cosmos discusses the Big Bang, known and proven theories, suspected hypothesese that have yet to be firmly established, cutting-edge discussions of modern particle physics experiments, and much more. Black-and-white diagrams help illustrate the amazing ideas presented with a minimum of mathematics and a maximum of awe.

A wonderful book.
Brilliant, engaging descriptions abound from cover to cover.
The amount of learning is tremendous, and the style, layout, and flow have perfect timing.
It is a very accessible introduction to Particle Physics understanding for novice science want-a-bees like me, but I'm absolute positive it would make a exemplary text for high-school and early college students.
Don Lincoln explains brilliantly our current cutting-edge knowledge, but while doing so, he adroitly describes, with much humor and anecdote, how we know it (the nuts and bolts), making the learning feel more real, and a lot more fun.
His descriptions of, and enthusiasm for, the tools of physics (the accelerators and experiments) and the excitement of discovery, are quite infectious.
I find that his down-to-earth, humorous analogies relating English and visuals to math were of the greatest benefit to me.
There's a heck of a lot of great humor all along the way. And that makes you smile a lot. And laugh a lot. And that makes it a lot easier to learn a lot!!! Very pleasant and entertaining to read.
There is an appeal to the anti-scientific-research hecklers in the epilogue that managed to give me goose bumps (ala Sagan and Dawkins).
I had a tremendous amount of fun reading it. I do Understand the Universe much, much better now.

Don Lincoln has done an excellent job writing about particle physics for the ordinary person. The book's title is "Understanding the Universe from Quarks to the Cosmos". The book's length is 567 pages including the index. Don has included a glossary of terms and a bibliography which pleased me.

This book was unavailable in Australia but Amazon had some copies. I have a college degree in science and I purchased the book to find out what was happenning at the cutting edge of particle physics. The book was published in 2004 so things have moved on a bit since then. For example Fermilab will aim its neutrino beams at a new complex being built at Ash River on the US Canadian border. They have been aiming the beam at the detector located underground in the old Soudan iron mine 720 miles north north east of Fermilab as explained in the book. This will give the neutrinos more time to oscillate before they are detected.

Unfortunately the Large Hadron Collider at CERN had a false start in September 2007 and it seems that Fermilab has not detected any evidence for the Higgs boson. So we're all waiting impatiently for news.

Don gives a basic explanation of superstring theory in Chapter 8 titled Exotic Physics (The Next Frontier).

I enjoyed reading this well crafted book and I learnt a lot.

Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos

Robert Hillier

Don Lincoln's explication of modern particle physics reminds me so much of that of our dearly-departed, beloved Isaac Asimov. Reading this book took me back to my teenage years delighting in Asimovian pop-physics. Down-to-earth, a little arithmetic where required, simplified and laid-out-plain, yet not dumbed-down. Need I say more?

An especially welcome extra is the appendix concerning the true nature of special relativity. Regardless of what you were taught and read, E=mc2 is *** not *** bedrock truth. Actually, as Dr. Lincoln lays it out in four pages, E=mc2 represents a special situation in which the unit chosen to stand for momentum is equal to unity (one). The *** true *** relativistic equation for energy (mass+kinetic+potential) has a few additional terms which can be conveniently dropped if the appropriate inertial frame is chosen. E=mc2 is really a working oversimplification that physics teachers also find handy in their presentations to their already-bewildered students.

Just to put a fine point on it, I was recently (May 1 2010) at the open house they had at the Jefferson Laboratory here in Virginia. JLab is a quark physics laboratory in Newport News. I was down in the accelerator tunnel, and, hearing the staff lecture I learned that the electrons in the beam pipe actually increase in mass as they undergo acceleration. Fancy that! Having read Lincoln's book, I had the temerity to mention Lincoln's argument that it is the INERTIA, and not the mass, that actually increases with energy. You should have seen the look on that feller's face! He was really peeved (you may substitute the other p-word there). To speak such utter heresy!

Well Mr. JLab, speaking heresies is how progress is so often made. It was once heresey to say the earth went round the sun. Bruno was burned at the stake for saying that the stars are only far-off suns. So I speak heresy in the name of progress. Read the book and decide for yourself. I have not seen this particular heresy spoken in any other popular science book. Apparently it's not well known even among practicing physicists (or at least accelerator techs).

So I heartily recommend Understanding the Universe. You will!