by Anton Radevsky and Emma Sanders, Papadakis. Hardback ISBN 9781906506063, £20.
You would never guess from the title that Voyage to the Heart of Matter is a pop-up book about the Large Hadron Collider. And that is a shame because it is an extraordinary work of paper engineering that deserves to stand out on the soon-to-be crowded shelf of popular books about the LHC.
Written by pop-up-book author Anton Radevsky and manager of CERN’s Microcosm exhibition Emma Sanders, Voyage is only eight pages long yet each turn of the page reveals a pop-up spread that will have you gasping with joy. Most of the corners open up to reveal yet more 3D delights, including delicate reproductions of the ATLAS tracking detectors and a miniature control room, complete with physicists. Others reveal movable elements showing how matter and antimatter annihilate or how showers of particles develop in a calorimeter.
Voyage exploits all three dimensions to wonderful effect. A glorious pop-up universe charts cosmic evolution from the first microsecond, chock-full of quarks and leptons, to the galaxies of present day. Readers are even given the chance to unfurl the ATLAS detector and install the inner detectors and muon chambers.
What is so charming about Voyage is the level of detail in the illustrations. You are guaranteed to spot something new each time you read it: the tiny human standing next to ATLAS; the trigger room; and event displays on the physicists’ computer screens.
Voyage does have its flaws, though. For instance, some of the pop-up structures need a helping hand as you open and close the pages. A more serious problem is that the authors know too much about ATLAS and haven’t simplified the words enough for ordinary readers. This is all the more apparent because of the book’s layout: the words need to be read in order yet the book has so many flaps that there is no clear order. The various detector components would benefit from being labelled too. (One of the pop-up structures remains a mystery to me.)
On balance, the book’s charms outweigh its faults. It is somehow fitting that its complex paper engineering reflects the engineering achievements of ATLAS and the LHC. Voyage is an enchanting book.
