****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
[This review, copied from Goodreads with an added comment on the excerpting, doesn't explicitly address the question of audience. But it should tell you two things: the level at which Lisa Randall begins her text (look for the quotation), and the name of a book that probably goes farther in explaining the basics.]Most people who were paying attention to the news in summer 2012 will have heard of an oddly named subatomic particle. On July 4, teams of scientists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that the data generated so far by a hugely complex and expensive machine called the Linear Hadron Collider (LHC) justified saying that they had discovered a new particle, which was likely to be a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson. Physicists were excited because their best current view of how things work on the scale of atoms and their components, which is called the Standard Model of particle physics, requires the Higgs boson to exist, as part of a mechanism that imparts mass to those particles that have it (which is almost all of them).The work of finding this thing has been daunting. The task of saying anything intelligible about it is, in a way, even more formidable. Every knowledgeable commentator among the handful I checked has taken a different tack. Some examples (minus many details):Stephen Wolfram, a polymath who began following particle physics in his teen years and earned a physics doctorate at age 20, published a blog post the day after the July announcement (at [...]). In it, he gave an overview of progress in the field over about 40 years, spiced with a good deal of personal flavor. Wolfram has the kind of mind that can easily harbor multiple attitudes, and here he seemed to reach two different conclusions. One involved a certain sense of letdown; particle physics had already lost much of its earlier excitement, and there was nothing (so far) genuinely new here, only the confirmation of something long expected. The other conclusion recognized that theory has much work left to do, though experiment may not. We still need some way of unifying everything that's already known and also explaining some current mysteries. Unsurprisingly, Wolfram here mentioned the work he's done on cellular automata, which--at least in his view--may serve to unify much that's currently unconnected.Aidan Randle-Conde, a postdoc working at the LHC, wrote a post for the Quantum Diaries blog in August (at[...]) analyzing the first two papers on the initial results. There was one from each of the two teams running detectors involved in the search, the CMS team and the ATLAS team. That blog is written by and for particle physicists, and naturally a good deal of Randle-Conde's report was technical, dealing with things like different decay modes. (I don't claim to understand all of it; I like reading things I don't understand, to see what I can figure out.) But he took care to stress more than once an important point you might not have gotten from the headlines: the results so far aren't decisive. Stressing what he called the main message, he exclaimed, "_we haven't discovered the Standard Model Higgs boson yet!_ We still have a long road ahead of us and already we have moved on to the next stage." What's been found might be called a Higgs-like particle; more measurements are needed to find out whether it behaves exactly as the Standard Model says it should. If it misbehaves, either it's something else or the theory is amiss.Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll began writing a book about the quest for the Higgs boson more than a year ago, hoping--justifiably, it turned out--that he'd be able to include a reported discovery in his text. I haven't read the book, which is called
