****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
She is a magnificent technician. She knows her ways in the corridors of the Standard model superbly. She is also very straight forward providing explanations about how things are working in the official Standard model.I am still reading the book--currently at chapter 16--and one thing is becoming more and more clear to me:The standard model, as does quantum physics--as I come to know them deeper--are acquiring an intense flavour of a patch. Of a set of rules and particles mastered to give explanation to experimental results. The quest for the Higgs Boson is no exception. It is an ingenuous postulation of a mechanism that gave explanation to all experimental results about 40 years ago. But as we dig deeper and get more experimental results with magnificent equipment, we are starting to see little subtle flaws in the theory that cannot be explained within the theory, no matter weather we are at the Higgs level or the Standard model level. These flaws will grow in importance and put the model in big trouble in not too long. It has happened may times before.How convenient that the Higgs field can spontaneously break the symmetry so that larger than 250GeV particles do not interact with it, but all those smaller do. Or to have an infinite supply of weak charge coming from who knows where. This last one responded a question I had in mind before reading this book: ¿How can the Higgs field maintain its density, so that mass does not vary with time, in an expanding universe?As George Santayana said: "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". And this is starting to have a strong flavour like the pre-Copernican equants (Claudius Ptolemy refined the deferent/epicycle concept and introduced the equant as a mechanism to account for speed variations in the planets' motion in a geocentric model). It so happened that the model was incorrect; not the observations.He also quoted: "In fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact." The last sentence of the quote may have an explanation for why we do have to have an explanation for everything. But there may simply not be one from our perspective...I am far from being an expert on these matters, but perhaps for not being an expert I have the luxury of a broader look at things. She is very good at what she does, but in my opinion she focuses a lot into details. And this is not her fault, but the fault of modern science. After Newton, Leipnitz and a few other great minds, we have convinced ourselves that specializing is the way to go. And in this turn of method we have lost the broader picture of things. Most of it is just sophisticated background noise.I think that modern Scientists run from any model that requires explanations out of the reaches of our physical universe. And in doing so they are confusing the "How" with the "Why". It frightens them that the Why for what we can perceive may come from other dimensions (if we believe in one of the strong theories they worship: "string theory"). Dimensions that may very well be out of our reach. Dark Matter and Dark Energy elusiveness is pointing this way.I really like this book for how it has helped me to think out of the box. Which, I am sure, was not her intention.But like I said, I am a nobody and most likely these rebellious ideas of mine are not correct.
