Understanding the Universe: from Quarks to the Cosmos by Don Lincoln, World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 981238703X £65 ($88). Paperback ISBN 9812387056 £17 ($28).
Do not let the over-ambitious title put you off. Don Lincoln's Understanding the Universe is a recent book about particle physics written by an experimental particle physicist of the Standard Model generation. Here it has a clear advantage over similar but older books that rely on appendices or additions to keep up to date. The book is addressed to the curious layman, with only a murky recollection of school physics, who wants to know how far mankind has gone in understanding the world around us. High-school students with an interest in physics will also find the book exciting and accessible. It is an excellent reference for any scientist who is occasionally unsure how best to explain a particular physics concept to a non-specialist audience.
In the whole book there are few mathematical equations and everything, from the principle of energy conservation to the Higgs mechanism, is explained in plain English. Lincoln does not distract his readers by trying to explain quantum mechanics in any depth. He warns simply that it is a bizarre theory in parts and presents its predictions in a matter-of-fact way.
Lincoln is enthusiastic, even passionate, and a man of some allegiance. Foremost he is a physicist, and in the first sentence of his book states that, in his opinion, physics is the most interesting science. He is an experimentalist, and throughout the book makes good-humoured jokes about his theoretical-physics colleagues. He is an American, often bringing baseball into his many examples. He is a Fermilab boy, from the lab that houses "the highest-energy particle accelerator in the world as of 1971 and probably through 2007, or even beyond". Finally, he is a member of the D0 collaboration with a detector "in some ways significantly superior" to rival CDF. If like most of us you are not from D0, you could forgive Lincoln, as his understanding and explanations of complex phenomena are excellent and the book strikes a balance between depth and accessibility.
The first two chapters provide an historical overview of particle physics from the Greek philosophers to the discovery of the muon neutrino at the beginning of the 1960s. Chapters three and four deal with the Standard Model. Chapter five is devoted to the search for the Higgs particle, and chapter six discusses the basic concepts behind particle acceleration (ignoring focusing and accelerator cavities, however) and detection.
The next two chapters deal with important unanswered questions: chapter seven presents hot research topics such as neutrino physics and charge-parity (CP) violation and chapter eight discusses grander but more speculative ideas including unification, extra dimensions and string theory. Finally, chapter nine covers cosmology - although the book could benefit from a longer discussion of dark energy - and chapter 10 approaches particle physics from the perspective of its benefits to mankind.
The book includes informative, but rather bland, figures. Although Lincoln is too young to include personal recollections of the personalities that shaped particle physics in the 20th century, his second-hand anecdotes and his first-hand account of the discovery of the top quark make interesting reading.
Lincoln cleverly includes an appendix that discusses issues further for the interested reader without obstructing the body of the book. However, it seems unnecessary to include a detailed account of Higgs production and an appendix on the pronunciation of Greek letters (where the reader finds out that alpha is pronounced "al-fuh"). The book also contains an extensive "further reading" section, which lists books and magazine articles (mostly from Scientific American) alongside Lincoln's assessment of them.
Understanding the Universe is recent, informative and accessible. If you come from the US (or, even better, from Illinois), you will enjoy it even more.
Mike Koratzinos, CERN.