by Elisabetta Durante (ed.), the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). Available from Presidenza INFN, Piazza dei Caprettari, 70 – 00186 Roma.
This booklet is a collection of articles published in one of Italy’s most important newspapers, Il Sole 24 Ore @lfa, to celebrate the World Year of Physics in 2005. The authors are researchers and professors from INFN, the body that funds a major part of particle-physics research in Italy. Throughout the book, it is interesting to see the effort made to show how many important applications of particle physics there are in everyday life, and the strong links that exist between the complicated machines that serve this kind of research and the technological objects that we use every day.
The language is simple, the articles are short and, in my opinion, accessible to the lay public. For example, natural radioactivity is mentioned alongside archaeological lead in order to explain the basic functioning of the Cuoricino experiment in the Gran Sasso Laboratory. Each article about current theory and experiments is followed by a spotlight on the application that has resulted from the research.
Two sentences in the book are particularly striking: the first sentence of all, which states “Physics has already understood all the easy things,” and the last one, which reads “Young researchers who have experienced laboratories such as CERN are the best example of an effective technology transfer.” I am not sure about what can be defined as “easy to understand” in physics but I do agree with the importance of sharing knowledge and how much this is done in international laboratories such as CERN.
