by Donald H Perkins (4th edition), Cambridge University Press 0 521 62196 8, £30/$49.95.
Does Donald Perkins’ classic Introduction to High Energy Physicsneed another review? When the first edition appeared in 1972, it quickly established itself as one of the most authoritative and successful textbooks on particle physics. However, the latest revision appeared in 1987 – before the advent of physics at LEP, the SLC, the Tevatron and HERA – and was beginning to show its age.
Donald Perkins’ distinguished career as an experimental particle physicist has been intimately connected with physics at CERN, where he has been a prime mover of many landmark experiments on neutrino scattering with bubble chambers. He has served as chairman of the Scientific Policy Committee and as UK delegate to the CERN Council. After retiring from his chair at Oxford, he has found the time to tackle a new edition.
The result is worth the wait: this is not just a straightforward update, it is a major rewrite, and the most comprehensive revision so far. It goes without saying that the book covers all significant developments of the past 15 years. Equally important, it has been reorganized thoroughly, such that the discussion is now firmly embedded in the classification of particles and forces of the Standard Model. A welcome addition are two new chapters that treat “Physics beyond the Standard Model” and “Particle physics and cosmology” in much more detail than previous editions and present the relevance of particle physics in a wider scientific context.
Notwithstanding the revised and more logical organization, the fourth edition does not sacrifice any of the qualities that have made previous versions so popular with students and lecturers alike. It focuses on phenomenological concepts rather than theoretical rigour, prefers illustrative examples and intuitive approaches to completeness and abstraction, and emphasizes the historical dimension to illustrate that particle physics is, more than ever, a fast-moving field.
To retain the same page count as previous editions, some material had to be omitted: this is less regrettable for the chapter on “Hadron-hadron interactions” than for most of the appendices, which provided much handy reference material. Useful additions to the supplementary material are a glossary, a historical account of “Milestones in particle physics” and a bibliography.
The latter is somewhat of a mixed success – while being a good guide to many classic books and papers, it omits many excellent, recent review articles that could take the novice reader to the forefront of current research in greater detail than is possible in a textbook. However, these are minor flaws when compared with the outstanding qualities of a book that once again is well poised to introduce generations of future researchers to the fascination of particle physics.
