Kwantowa granica. LHC - Wielki Zderzacz Hadronów

by Don Lincoln

The highest-energy particle accelerator ever built, the Large Hadron Collider runs under the border between France and Switzerland. It leapt into action on September 10, 2008, amid unprecedented global press coverage and widespread fears that its energy would create tiny black holes that could destroy the earth.

By smashing together particles smaller than atoms, the LHC recreates the conditions hypothesized to have existed just moments after the big bang. Physicists expect it to aid our understanding of how the universe came into being and to show us much about the standard model of particle physics -- even possibly proving the existence of the mysterious Higgs boson. In exploring what the collider does and what it might find, Don Lincoln explains what the LHC is likely to teach us about particle physics, including uncovering the nature of dark matter, finding micro black holes and supersymmetric particles, identifying extra dimensions, and revealing the origin of mass in the universe.

Thousands of physicists from around the globe will have access to the LHC, none of whom really knows what outcomes will be produced by the $7.7 billion project. Whatever it reveals, the results arising from the Large Hadron Collider will profoundly alter our understanding of the cosmos and the atom and stimulate amateur and professional scientists for years to come.

Genres: Science, Physics, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published February 4, 2009

About the author

Don Lincoln is a Senior Scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). He is also a Guest Professor of High Energy Physics at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. in Experimental Particle Physics from Rice University.

Dr. Lincoln’s research has been divided between Fermilab’s Tevatron Collider, until its close in 2011, and the CERN Large Hadron Collider, located outside Geneva, Switzerland. The author of more than 1,000 scientific publications, his most noteworthy accomplishments include serving on the teams that discovered the top quark in 1995 and confirmed the Higgs boson in 2012. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His writing at a popular level includes many articles as well as four books: Understanding the Universe, The Quantum Frontier, The Large Hadron Collider, and Alien Universe. His enthusiasm for science education earned him the 2013 Outreach Prize from the High Energy Physics Division of the European Physical Society.

Dr. Lincoln has given hundreds of lectures on four continents to a broad range of audiences. He is a blogger for the website of the PBS television series NOVA, and he also writes a weekly column for the online periodical Fermilab Today.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a very good intro to the basics of the LHC, but then changes gears in the middle of chapter 4. Here he tells you that the book is going to go into more details so general readers should just skip to the next chapter. It read to me like he had written the last half of the 4th chapter first, then was told to dumb it down for real people and just wrote around it. He really should have gone back and put some more time into that part.
Still, it has lots of interesting stuff throughout. It begins by telling us why it is safe and what we already know about the standard model. Stuff like quarks and neutrinos and the strong force. Then it explains the stuff the LHC will look for like the Higgs Boson, Supersymmetry and even possible what makes up quarks. Then it gets more interesting talking about how the LHC will create beams of particles, and how it will detect the aftermath of the collisions. I was most entertained by the last chapter's insight into what the future holds for this type of research, including dark matter and the future of large colliders. So although it is rather thin, especially without half of a chapter, I still recommend it if you don't mind getting half a book for full price.

[Reet · Rating 2 out of 5]

Science should be the main character of the book, not scientists.

[Dee Eisel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this one from the library, which is good - it's a decent book, but it doesn't quite make it to "book I'd have on my shelf." (I actually recommend the film Particle Fever, which is available on Netflix, for good information on the topic of CERN and the discovery of the Higgs boson.)

Lincoln does a decent job talking about the history of CERN, and detailing some of the past accelerators and the work they did. I liked his description of quarks and how they might work. But, ultimately, his writing just didn't snag me. I remember reading Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics in college and being entranced by the ideas there, so it's not the subject that's unappealing to me. Lincoln just doesn't succeed in getting across a sense of wonder.

I appreciated the diagrams of the different detectors and learning how they worked. Lincoln downplays the issues that happened during the first power up of the collider, although he does mention them. I am not sure why he did that, unless it was to focus on its successes and ignore very real problems. As a member of the CERN team that's somewhat understandable, but it was a bias I didn't enjoy.

All in all, it was good, but I could sense where it could have been fantastic.

[Vance J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A splendid little book by Don Lincoln of Fermilab. A Nobel laureate himself, he captures the essence of our knowledge of particle physics in an easy-to-understand matter. Focused on the state of the science just before the startup of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, I think it holds up very well 10 years later. For more, see Fermilab’s YouTube site that features many videos from Lincoln in the same conversational style.

[Patrick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish. Jumps too hard between oversimplifying some portions while being overly complicated in others. Felt like it did a poor job of bridging the gap of a layman to expert

[Jason Furman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well written, well organized book on the Large Hadron Collider that is now operating at CERN. The five chapter titles pretty much tell you what you'll get out of the book: (1) What We Know: The Standard Model; (2) What We Guess: Theories We Want to Test; (3) How We Do It: The Large Hadron Collider; (4) How We See It: The Enormous Detectors; and (5) Where We're Going: The Big Picture, the Universe, and the Future.

It is written by a practicing physicist who writes well and uses lots of diagrams. About half of the book is "new" in that it focuses on the technical and engineering aspects of the LHC and isn't repeated in lots of other popular science books. The other half of the book is a review of the standard model and other theories the LHC is expected to test. These are somewhat terse and not hugely in depth but well presented and focused and directed very much towards the issues that the LHC will be able to explore.

Notably, while the book goes through supersymmetry, preons (the hypothesized particles that make up quarks), various speculations on dark energy, MACHOs, WIMPs, etc., the phrase "string theory" does not appear once in the book itself (it is in one of the quotes in Leon Lederman's excellent preface). Which tells you something about its relationship to experiment.

[mpdg · Rating 2 out of 5]

świat nie wybuchnie przez Wielki Zderzacz Hadronów.

mniej-więcej tyle zrozumiałam z całej książki. dla mnie nie do przebrnięcia, jeśli chce się zrozumieć całość - i generalnie wydaje mi się, że nie do przebrnięcia dla jakiegokolwiek laika. niby chwyty z Hawkinga (wyobraźmy sobie, że rzucamy bananem w ołowianą ścianę) ale poprzedzone ogromną ilością tekstu, który dla mnie brzmi jak fizyczny bełkot, którego nie potrafię zrozumieć. miałam nadzieję na więcej historii powstania LHC i na proste ujęcie, co tak naprawdę pracownicy CERNu chcą odkryć/znaleźć.

generalnie 2/5, chyba że ktoś kto na codzień nie ma do czynienia z fizyką chce spędzić długie godziny próbując zrozumieć wszystko o bozonach, mionach i hadronach.

[Todd Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Quantum Frontier provides an overview of particle physics, the Large Hadron Collider and some of the discoveries that might occur.

Though the book itself is not particularly well written and presents the information rather dryly, the science behind the collider is fascinating and certainly the discoveries that it produces could provide insight into the fundamental nature of the universe including: verification of the Higgs boson (the force particle thought to be responsible for mass), insight into super symmetry, possible discoveries relating to dark matter and/or dark energy.

Stay tuned. We should start hearing news from CERN within the next few years.

[Ken Rideout · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great first couple chapters - one of the best introductions to the standard model I have ever read (he kept it simple and clean with very little clutter). But then I glazed over with the details of the collider at CERN and its detection equipment. A good read for people who don't have any idea why particle physicists do the things they do.

[Cassandra Kay Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was extremely basic. If you know anything at all about particle physics you will be very bored. I think there is more pertinent time sensitive information about the "frontier of research" on the CERN website.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of this book is quite approachable for a rather complex subject. But the book gets kind of long in the tooth in the second half. Still for an overview of some of what this area is about it isn't a bad read.

[Riccardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting overview on fundamentals of contemporary particle physics.
It offers an exciting assessment of the Large Haldron Collider.

The book is written in a readable style, and can be appreciated to anyone with even a vague interest in science.