Seeing Particles: Adventures Of An Experimental Physicist - A Journey To The Infinitesimal

by Michael G Albrow

This book tells the story of a physicist's sixty years of experimental research into subatomic particles, eventually showing that the quarks that are forever trapped inside protons are smaller than a trillionth trillionth the size of the smallest atom, hydrogen. The author describes how he and his colleagues made many different types of particle detector, explaining how these enable us to "see" these tiniest constituents of matter, and how they were used to search for new fundamental particles. He tells the story of his search for the fourth quark, charm, and the weak force carriers W and Z, and how others found them, but then he participated in the discovery of the most massive top quark at Fermilab and the Higgs boson at CERN. His descriptions of the physics are accessible to a general reader, alongside personal stories including some encounters with great physicists.

188 pages, Hardcover

Published August 14, 2026

Reviews

[Mark Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent tour through an experimental particle physicist's life, with many interesting anecdotes about the people he worked with and the experiments that succeeded - or failed.

Great stuff.

One final quote about Wolfgang Paul (not Pauli) and Hans Dehmelt who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1989.

"Paul and Dehmelt had trapped single electrons and ions in magnetic fields. An electron was kept going around (orbiting) in a tight circle for three months (Dehmelt named it Priscilla!), rather like a hydrogen atom without a proton – he called that geonium. ... Comparing his measurements with the theory of quantum electrodynamics, he determined that the radius of an electron is smaller than 10^-22 m!"

[MICHAEL G ALBROW · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tells fascinating stories of how the author spent over 60 years studying subatomic particles more than a billion times smaller than the smallest atom. After describing his attempts to discover new particles that others found first it leads up to his part in the discovery of the most massive known so far, the Higgs boson at CERN and the top quark at Fermilab. It is a highly readable personal memoire, including some encounters with great physicists.