AFTER last year鈥檚 false start, the world is waiting for the most powerful particle accelerator to pick up where it left off. So it is an ideal time to take stock of the Large Hadron Collider.
The Quantum Frontier is one of the first popular books to appear about the LHC and it certainly won鈥檛 be the last. quickly dispenses with the brouhaha over the LHC destroying the world and concentrates instead on explaining how the accelerator might advance our understanding of fundamental particles and forces, how to smash particles together, and how to make sense of the resulting particle debris.
What Lincoln does brilliantly is dispel the popular myth that the LHC was built solely to discover the Higgs boson, or 鈥淕od particle鈥�. This is a project with a far wider reach. With one eye on his physics peers, Lincoln sometimes strays into too much detail and jargon, but otherwise his fresh analogies and insights make this book very readable.
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The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider
Johns Hopkins University Press