By Lincoln Wolfenstein and João P Silva
Taylor & Francis; CRC Press 2011
Paperback: £30 $49.95
E-book: $49.95
Writing a book is no easy task. It surely requires a considerable investment of time and effort (it is difficult enough to write short book reviews). This is especially true with books about complex scientific topics, written by people who are certainly not professional writers. I doubt that the authors of the books reviewed in the CERN Courier have taken courses on how to write bestsellers. Being such hard work, the authors must have good reasons to embark on the daunting challenge of writing a book.
When I started reading Exploring Fundamental Particles, I immediately wondered what could have been the reasons that triggered Lincoln Wolfenstein and João Silva to write such a book. After all, there are already many “textbooks” about particle physics, both in generic terms and in specific topics. For instance, the puzzling topic of CP violation is described in much detail in the book CP Violation (OUP 1999), by Gustavo Branco, Luís Lavoura and João Silva (the same João Silva, despite the fact that João and Silva are probably the two most common Portuguese names). There are also many books about particle physics that address the “general public”, such as the fascinating Zeptospace Odyssey (OUP 2009), by Gian Giudice, which is a nice option for summer reading, despite the somewhat weird title (the start-of-section quotations are particularly enjoyable).
Exploring Fundamental Particles follows an intermediate path. It addresses a broad spectrum of physics topics all of the way from Newton (!) and basic quantum mechanics to the searches for the Higgs boson at the LHC – building the Standard Model along the way. And yet, despite its wide scope, the book focuses with particularly high resolution on a few specific issues, such as CP violation and neutrino physics, which are not exactly the easiest things to explain to a wide audience. The authors must have faced difficult moments during the writing and editing phases, trying hard to keep the text readable for non-experts, while giving the book a “professional touch”.
This somewhat schizophrenic style can be illustrated by the fact that while the book is submerged in Feynman diagrams, some of them are quite hard to digest (“Penguins” and other beasts), it has no equations at all (not even the ubiquitous E=mc2) – maybe for fear of losing the reader – until we reach the end of the book (the fifth appendix, after more than 250 pages, where we do see E=mc2). The reading is not easy (definitely not a “summertime book”) so, for an audience of university students and young researchers, adding a few equations would have improved the clarity of the exposition.
I also found it disturbing to see the intriguing discussions of puzzling subjects interrupted by trivial explanations on how to pronounce “Delta rho”, “psi prime” etc. These parenthetical moments distract the readers who are trying to remain concentrated on the important narrative and are useless to the other readers. (If you do not know how to pronounce a few common Greek letters, you are not likely to survive a guided tour through the CKM matrix.)
I hope the authors (and editor) will soon revise the book and publish a second edition. In the meantime, I will surely read again a few sections of this edition; for certain things, it is really quite a useful book.
