Hardback ISBN 9781905264957, £18.99. Paperback ISBN 9780753522110, £13.99.
CERN Courier readers don’t need to be told that the search for the Higgs boson consumes a considerable fraction of resources in modern particle physics. I am certain that many of you have been asked by family, friends and neighbours for an explanation of what the fuss is all about.
Ian Sample’s Massive is a marvellous book and well worth reading by both researchers and the layman. In it, Sample describes the history and the personalities behind the search for the Higgs boson. He dispels the common simplifying myth that a single lone genius named Peter Higgs was the sole theoretical mind behind the idea. Instead, Sample gives appropriate credit to the many theorists who made equally critical intellectual contributions.
The author also guides us through history, stopping at points of interest along the way, from the prediction of and the discovery of the W and Z bosons, to the debacle that was the Superconducting Super Collider, to today’s exciting efforts at both the Tevatron and the LHC. Along the journey, he relates entertaining anecdotes that he gleaned from interviews with many researchers central to the effort to search for the Higgs over the past several decades. I know personally many of the people whose names appear throughout the book, and I can attest that Sample has accurately conveyed their voices without the distortions that one often observes when reading a report in the media.
Sample’s book does have an intentional weakness. He has clearly chosen to focus on the history and personalities involved in the saga of the Higgs boson and to gloss over many technical physics details. A reader who wants to understand more about quarks and leptons and the forces that tie them together will find many other books that do a much better job with these and similar concepts. The book contains only as much physics as is necessary to tie together the human narrative and these two topics are melded together into a seamless and pleasant read.
I did find one physics error in the book. While describing the search for the Higgs boson at the LHC, Sample writes about the decay modes for Higgs bosons with both low and high mass. For the high mass, he states that the expectation is to see four leptons, while at low mass he mentions only the two-photon decay mode. He gives the false impression that this is the dominant mode, rather than simply the one that is popular at the LHC owing to the lower backgrounds. This regrettable error will offend only the purists and does not detract from what I think is an excellent book. I strongly recommend it.
