By Daniel Denegri, Claude Guyot, Andreas Hoecker and Lydia Roos
EDP Sciences
Paperback: €34
Also available at the CERN bookshop
The authors, leading figures in the CMS and ATLAS experiments, have succeeded in writing a remarkable book, which I enthusiastically recommend to anyone interested in learning about the recent progress, open questions and future perspectives of high-energy physics. Throughout its 300 pages, it offers a broad coverage of the present status of particle physics, adding a few chronological accounts to place things in an historical context.
Despite being published in a collection that targets the general public, the book delves into several topics to a deep level and will be useful reading for many professional physicists. To accommodate different audiences, the authors have organized the book nicely in two “layers”, the standard flow of chapters being complemented by extra boxes giving “further reading”. Still, the reader is often told that some sections might be left aside in a first reading. It seems to me that this is a well-balanced solution for such a book, although I wonder if most readers from the “general public” would agree with the claim that the text is written in a “simple and pedagogical form”. The first chapter, describing the Standard Model, is particularly demanding and long, but these 40 pages should not deter: the rest of the book provides easier reading.
I was impressed particularly by the care with which the authors prepared many figures, which in some cases include details that I have not seen in previous works of this kind – for example, the presence of gluon lines and quark–antiquark loops inside the cartoon representing the pion, besides the standard valence quarks. Such representations are common for the proton, especially when discussing deep-inelastic scattering measurements, but it is rare to point out that any hadron – including the π or the Υ – should equally be characterized by “parton distribution functions”. The profusion of high-quality figures and photographs contributes significantly to making this book well worth reading.
A few things could be improved in a future edition. For instance, the number of footnotes is excessive. While meant as asides not worth including in the main body of the text, they end up disrupting the fluidity of the reading, especially when placed in the middle of a sentence. Most footnotes should be integrated in the text, deleted, or moved to the end of the book, so that the reader can ignore them if preferred. While understanding that this book is addressed to a French audience, I would nevertheless recommend “smoothing out” some French-specific choices. For instance, I was pleased to read that Pierre Fayet, in Paris, had an important role in the development of the MSSM extension to the Standard Model, but I was puzzled to see no other name mentioned in the pages devoted to supersymmetry.
Being one of the “LHC adventurers” myself, I read with particular curiosity the chapters devoted to the construction of the LHC accelerator and experiments, which include many interesting details about sociological aspects. I would have liked this part to have been further expanded, especially knowing by personal experience how fascinating it is to listen to Daniel Denegri, when he tells all sorts of anecdotes about physics and physicists.
All in all, this is a highly recommendable book, which provides an interesting guided tour through present-day high-energy physics while, at the same time, offering opportunities for non-French people to learn some French expressions, such as “se faire coiffer au poteau“. Note, however, that the enjoyable reading comes mixed with harder sections, which require extra effort from the reader: this book, like the LHC data, provides “du pain sur la planche“.
