In Conclusion: A Collection of Summary Talks in High Energy Physics by James D Bjorken, World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 981023869X, £86 ($116). Paperback 9812384650, £40 ($54).
Few people have been asked to give as many conference summary talks as James D Bjorken; no-one has given them better. It is therefore an interesting idea to collect "Bj's" summaries into a single volume; to some extent, the idea works.
This book is divided into four sections, covering major areas of interest and activity in the author's career. Each section contains around five to seven talks stretching over the 40 or so years of Bj's activity at the forefront of theoretical physics. Each section is preceded by perhaps the most valuable element in the book: a preface in which the author puts each talk in its historical context, explains his thought processes and often delights the reader with a typical piece of self-deprecatory wit.
It must be admitted that many of the talks emit a musty air of controversies long stilled and ideas long forgotten; in particular, the first section, "From Current Algebra to Partons", is at times arcane and difficult unless one is familiar with the subject.
Nevertheless, there are moments of real pleasure in the elegance of Bj's thinking about deep inelastic scattering before the experiments at SLAC made the subject topical. An example is the idea that the known locality of the lepton electromagnetic and weak currents, and their great phenomenological similarity to the hadron currents, strongly implies that the weak and electromagnetic charges in the proton are also point-like. Other gems include the fortunate demise of the US proposal to name the quark colours red, white and blue!
Another fascinating section lays out the background to the discovery of the J/psi; some of the plots clearly show the J/psi enhancement, albeit with poor resolution, while theorists were trying to fit the data with various exotic parton densities and wondering why they got poor fits. Another theme throughout the book, illuminated with Bj's mordant wit, is the wonderful nature of hindsight.
The second half of the book is significantly more interesting to the experimentalist than the first, particularly the talks relating to the interpretation of electron-positron annihilation. A particular joy is the inclusion on page 233 of Bob Gould's immortal cartoon of the J/psi discovery. The final section deals with futurology. Many of the ideas contained therein are remarkably prescient and of value even today. Typically, Bj draws attention to areas in which he went spectacularly wrong: first opposing the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) as too ambitious, he became a convert and just before its demise gave a talk saying how wrong he had been and that the SSC was clearly politically secure. Well, this reviewer made the same mistake and is proud to be in such illustrious company.
There is much pure gold in this book. As a primer on many of the major ideas of modern particle physics explained by one of its foremost architects, it is a work of lasting value. Sadly, it is littered with misprints and typographical errors, but presumably these are propagated unchanged from the original articles. Reading it from cover to cover is not to be recommended; dipping into it and benefiting from Bj's unique combination of wisdom and wit most certainly is.
Brian Foster, Oxford.