On 18 November 2010, CERN signed an agreement with the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) GmbH, the company that is co-ordinating the construction of the accelerator and experiment facilities for the FAIR project in Germany. The agreement, which was signed by CERN’s director-general, Rolf Heuer (left) and FAIR’s scientific director Boris Sharkov, concerns collaboration in accelerator sciences and technologies and other scientific domains of mutual interest.
By B Lee Roberts and William J Marciano (eds.)
World Scientific
Hardback: £113 $164 E-book: $213
In December 1947, Julian Schwinger wrote a letter to the editor of Physical Review, wherein he reports in a mere five paragraphs that he has found “an additional magnetic moment associated with the electron spin”. He gives the value as α/2π=0.00116 and states that it is “the simplest example of a radiative correction” in the new theory of QED.
We have come a long way since Schwinger’s letter. Toichiro Kinoshita has computed the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron up to the tenth order. Nature has revealed further mysteries in the intervening years, including the existence of the muon, with which to test our theories. Famously, the Brookhaven measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon shows an approximately 3σ deviation from the theoretical prediction of the Standard Model. Experiments have been searching for the CP-violating electric dipole moment as well, with many more experiments coming.
Lepton Dipole Moments, a review volume edited by Lee Roberts and William Marciano, begins with a historical perspective by Roberts and is followed by many excellent review articles. Articles are written by leaders of the field: Andrzej Czarnecki and Marciano on new physics and dipole moments, Michel Davier on g-2 vacuum polarization issues, Dominik Stoeckinger on new physics in g-2, Yasuhiro Okada on models of lepton-flavour violation, Eugene Commins and David DeMille on the electric dipole moment of the electron, and many more.
One reason that lepton moments are interesting to pursue, even during these heady times of high-energy LHC collisions, is their sensitivity to “chirality enhanced” contributions from new physics. In the case of supersymmetry, some large-tanβ theories can yield parametrically larger supersymmetric contributions than Standard Model contributions, increasing sensitivity to higher scales than usual electroweak precision tests allow. An analogous situation occurs for theories with large, new flavour- or CP-violating effects. Lepton dipole moment experiments are reaching levels of sensitivity that will make or break theories. For example, even theories of baryogenesis, which seem far remote at first thought from the vagaries of lepton dipole moments, “will be put to the ultimate test with the next generation of experiments”, as Maxim Pospelov and Adam Ritz rightly explain.
The energy frontier is not the only place to put fundamental physics under extreme test, as this volume attests. Roberts and Marciano have put together an excellent survey of lepton dipole moments and their certain power to change our world view whatever may come.
By Wojciech Florkowski
World Scientific
Hardback: £66 $96
Wojciech Florkowski’s book on ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions appears right at the beginning of a new era in the field. In 2010, two new experimental heavy-ion programmes started at CERN. First, lead nuclei were accelerated to the highest ever energy – 1.38 TeV per nucleon – at the LHC and rich experimental results were released by the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations, even during the first data-taking period in November/December 2010. Second, in parallel, a new fixed-target heavy-ion programme at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) was launched with the acceleration of lead beams to the lowest-ever energy in the SPS, namely 13.9 GeV per nucleon. This was to study the use of the fragment separator in producing secondary light-ion beams for the NA61/SHINE experiment. These two research programmes are perfectly complementary. The one at the LHC aims at a systematic investigation of hot and dense quark-gluon plasma. The one at the SPS, on the other hand, will search for the critical point of strongly interacting matter and study the properties of the onset of deconfinement.
This book by Florkowski is highly relevant for all participants in the new programmes at CERN. I am convinced that it may also help all non-heavy-ion physicists involved in experiments at CERN to understand the language and excitement of their heavy-ion colleagues.
Furthermore, it gives an excellent introduction to and an in-depth review of the standard theoretical framework that is used to interpret the heavy-ion data. It provides a clear, logical and unified description of statistical, hydrodynamical and kinetic models. All this is illustrated by a selection of the most relevant experimental results of the past programmes at Brookhaven’s Alternating Gradient Synchrotron and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, as well as at the SPS. Finally, there are various exercises in each chapter for use as a textbook in a graduate course.
All in all, this book is highly recommendable both for heavy-ion and non-heavy-ion physicists.
Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime: Quantized Fields and Gravity
By Leonard Parker and David Toms
Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £48 $83 E-book: $64
Exact Space–Times in Einstein’s General Relativity
By Jerry B Griffiths and Jirˇí Podolský
Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £80 $129 E-book: $100
Long ago, more or less immediately after Einstein’s formulation of general relativity, one of the dreams of physics was to understand why flat space–time is so special. Why are quantum mechanics and field theory formulated in flat space while their curved-space analogues are sometimes ill defined, at least conceptually? Can we hope, as Richard Feynman speculated, to quantize gravity in flat space–times and then construct all of the most complicated geometries as coherent states of gravitons?
The dreams of a more coherent picture of gravity and of gauge interactions in flat space are probably still there, but nowadays theorists invest a great deal of effort in understanding the subtleties of the quantization of fields, particles, strings and (mem)branes in geometries that are curved both in space and in time. Cambridge University Press was one of the first publishers to voice these attempts with the classic Quantum Fields in Curved Space by N B Birrel and P C W Davies, which is now well known to many students since its first edition in 1982. Leonard Parker (distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin) and David Toms (reader in mathematical physics and statistics at the University of Newcastle) were both abundantly quoted in the book by Birrel and Davies and they have now published Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime, also with Cambridge. While readers of Birrel and Davies will certainly like this new book, newcomers and students will appreciate the breadth and the style of a treatise written by two well known scientists who have dedicated their lives to the understanding of the treatment of quantum fields in a fixed gravitational background.
The book consists of seven chapters spread evenly between pure theory and applications. One of its features is the attention to the introductory aspects of a problem: students and teachers will like this aspect. The introductory chapter reminds the reader of various concepts arising in field theory in flat space–time, while the second chapter introduces the basic aspects of quantum field theory in curved backgrounds. After the central chapters dealing with useful applications (including the discussion of pair creation in black-hole space–times) the derivation of effective actions of fields of various spins is presented, always by emphasizing the curved-space aspects.
A rather appropriate companion volume is Exact Space-Times in Einstein’s General Relativity by Jerry Griffiths and Jiří Podolský, published by Cambridge in late 2009. Here, the interested reader is led through a review of the monumental work performed by general relativists over the past 50 years. The book also complements (and partially extends) the famous work by Dietrich Kramer, Hans Stephani, Malcolm MacCallum and Eduard Herlt, Exact Solutions of Einstein’s Field Equations, first published, again by Cambridge, in 1980.
Like its famous ancestor, the book by Griffiths and Podolský will probably be used as a collection of exact solutions by practitioners. However this risk is moderated to some extent by a presentation in the style of an advanced manual of general relativity (GR). The 22 chapters cover in more than 500 pages all of the most important solutions of GR. After two introductory chapters the reader is guided on a tour of the most important spatially homogeneous and spatially inhomogeneous, four-dimensional background geometries, starting from de Sitter and anti-de Sitter space–times but quickly moving to a whole zoo of geometries that are familiar to theorists but which may sound rather arcane to scientists who are not directly working with GR.
Both books reviewed here can also be recommended because they tell of the achievements of a generation of theorists whose only instruments were, for a good part of their lives, a pad of paper and a few pencils.
by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder, Vintage Books. Paperback ISBN 9780099521341, £7.99. E-book ISBN 9781409076667, £8.16.
I first came to know the housekeeper, her son and the memory-impaired professor through their roles in an in-flight movie en route from Tokyo to Frankfurt. The filmmaking is beautiful and the acting sublime, but the real surprise is the subject matter. This is a story about “Euler’s identity”, and it carries it off brilliantly, leaving behind a true appreciation of the beauty of numbers. I stepped off the plane wondering if Hollywood could ever do such a thing, and so was happy to discover that at least the novel on which the film was based has an English translation, now available in paperback.
The Housekeeper and the Professor tells the story of a mathematician whose short-term memory following an accident is limited to 80 minutes. He makes his way through the day thanks to Post-it notes, but each morning is a new beginning. It’s a story of platonic affection, shared between the professor, his housekeeper and her 10-year-old son and as such is reminiscent of Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road. Where it diverges, however, is in its core theme. Rather than through a shared love of books, the protagonists’ relationship blossoms by way of mathematics.
Maths is perhaps the most difficult of sciences to popularize. Even Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician and Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, struggles to convey the beauty of numbers in his engaging BBC documentary, The Story of Maths. But where du Sautoy bravely tackles the full story, Ogawa focuses on just one of mathematics’ most remarkable equations, eiπ+1=0, gently preparing the reader to understand why this deceptively simple collection of symbols is so extraordinary.
The key to Ogawa’s success is the pace of the story, dictated by the fact that the professor begins every day anew. Each morning starts with the same basic conversation, pointing out the significance of a particular number. “What’s your shoe size?” asks the professor, for example. “24,” comes the reply and the professor goes on to explain that this is the factorial of four. As the conversation develops, we learn that the housekeeper’s phone number is the total number of primes between one and 100 million, and a little more maths appears with each conversation.
The square root symbol makes its first appearance as early as the first page – “Root” is what the professor calls the housekeeper’s boy. “With this one little sign, we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can’t see,” he explains. And sure enough, the square root of –1 makes its introduction two pages later. For e and π, we have to wait until much later.
The maths is never overwhelming, each step being carefully introduced for the benefit of the housekeeper and Root. A shared passion for baseball proves fertile ground for mathematical conversation. We learn, for example, that Babe Ruth’s 1935 record of 714 home runs multiplied by its successor (715 set by Hank Aaron in 1974) is equal to the product of the first seven primes and that the sum of the prime factors of 714 and 715 is the same. Because consecutive numbers with this property are rare – there are only 26 such pairs up to 20,000 – they’re known as Ruth-Aaron pairs. Mathematics like this weaves its way through the story so that by the time Euler’s identity is unveiled, the shock of finding a square root on the first page has been replaced by the pleasure of playing with numbers. Euler’s identity is the breathtaking icing on the cake.
The Housekeeper and the Professor is a beautifully told and ultimately touching tale. But perhaps its greatest achievement is that it leaves the reader with a sense of awe at the beauty of numbers.
Yoko Ogawa has published more than 20 works of fiction and non-fiction and won every major Japanese literary prize, says her biography on the Macmillan Publishing website. Two of her novels and a collection of short stories are now available in English. Her non-fiction collaboration with mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara has not yet been translated. Personally, I can’t wait.
Hardback ISBN 9781905264957, £18.99. Paperback ISBN 9780753522110, £13.99.
CERN Courier readers don’t need to be told that the search for the Higgs boson consumes a considerable fraction of resources in modern particle physics. I am certain that many of you have been asked by family, friends and neighbours for an explanation of what the fuss is all about.
Ian Sample’s Massive is a marvellous book and well worth reading by both researchers and the layman. In it, Sample describes the history and the personalities behind the search for the Higgs boson. He dispels the common simplifying myth that a single lone genius named Peter Higgs was the sole theoretical mind behind the idea. Instead, Sample gives appropriate credit to the many theorists who made equally critical intellectual contributions.
The author also guides us through history, stopping at points of interest along the way, from the prediction of and the discovery of the W and Z bosons, to the debacle that was the Superconducting Super Collider, to today’s exciting efforts at both the Tevatron and the LHC. Along the journey, he relates entertaining anecdotes that he gleaned from interviews with many researchers central to the effort to search for the Higgs over the past several decades. I know personally many of the people whose names appear throughout the book, and I can attest that Sample has accurately conveyed their voices without the distortions that one often observes when reading a report in the media.
Sample’s book does have an intentional weakness. He has clearly chosen to focus on the history and personalities involved in the saga of the Higgs boson and to gloss over many technical physics details. A reader who wants to understand more about quarks and leptons and the forces that tie them together will find many other books that do a much better job with these and similar concepts. The book contains only as much physics as is necessary to tie together the human narrative and these two topics are melded together into a seamless and pleasant read.
I did find one physics error in the book. While describing the search for the Higgs boson at the LHC, Sample writes about the decay modes for Higgs bosons with both low and high mass. For the high mass, he states that the expectation is to see four leptons, while at low mass he mentions only the two-photon decay mode. He gives the false impression that this is the dominant mode, rather than simply the one that is popular at the LHC owing to the lower backgrounds. This regrettable error will offend only the purists and does not detract from what I think is an excellent book. I strongly recommend it.
by David Goodstein, Princeton University Press. Hardback ISBN 9780691139661, £15.95 ($22.95). E-book ISBN 9781400834570, $22.95.
Now that we can easily access scientific papers without leaving our offices, thanks to the availability of electronic versions of the most important journals, many of us at CERN rarely visit the library. Yet there are many other good reasons to stop by, among them the recently created bookshop, which houses a diverse collection of interesting books. This is where I first saw this book, in which David Goodstein shares his knowledge and reflections on scientific misconduct, including first-hand reports on some of the allegations that he studied as Caltech’s vice provost.
Throughout the book, Goodstein presents several cases with considerable detail, such that the reader is invited to judge whether scientific misconduct happened or not. The opening case describes Robert Millikan’s determination of the electron’s charge, based on measurements of 58 oil droplets, and addresses the allegation that this was a subset of all observations, selected because they were in line with the experimenter’s convictions. The verdict, “not guilty”, is supported by 22 informative pages, offering the reader a tour of the difficulties of the experiment – in the context of 1912 – including an explanation of why viscosity played a more important role than gravity or electricity in understanding the movement of the oil drops. I particularly enjoyed seeing four pages from the original notebooks where the measurements were written down. Rather than “manipulating” his data, Millikan carefully selected high-quality observations to obtain an accurate measurement: his result agrees with the modern value within its quoted 0.2% uncertainty.
The book also contains a highly entertaining report of the “strange and complex case of cold fusion”, following the saga from March 1989 to recent days. Here there is also no evidence of scientific fraud, defined by the author as “faking or fabricating data or plagiarism”. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons should not have announced their “discovery” as they did (in a press conference) and when they did (too early, fearing to be scooped by someone else). Nuclear fusion on a tabletop would really be too good to be true and many physicists and electrochemists promptly dismissed those claims after finding that they could not reproduce the results in their own labs; but “self-delusion, misperceptions, unrealistic expectations and flawed experimentation are not instances of scientific fraud”. Real fraud, in physics, is illustrated by the putative discovery of element 118 by Victor Ninov (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and by the “remarkable” breakthroughs of Jan Hendrik Schön (Bell Labs) in the field of organic semiconductors. Caltech’s own problems of research misconduct are illustrated with two cases in biology.
The first chapter is particularly worth reading, reminding us of the main ideas of Francis Bacon and Karl Popper regarding the scientific method, although I prefer the elegant summary provided by Bo Anderson back in 1984: “Nature never tells you when you are right but only when you are wrong; therefore, you have only learned something when you disagree with the data.” Also, Richard Feynman argued that scientists should carefully report everything they are aware of that could invalidate their measurements or models. Goodstein shows that these laudable ideas are not really suitable in the real world, to ensure rapid and robust scientific progress. Based on his own experience, he argues that bad theories and the experiments that prove them wrong are “quickly and quietly forgotten”. Who has ever received a Nobel prize for showing that a model disagreed with data? After listing “fifteen seemingly plausible ethical principles for science”, he systematically reveals their insufficiencies as guidelines to sound scientific conduct and replaces them with a more pragmatic “user’s manual” on how to pursue a successful and honest career in science.
I would have liked to have seen more examples of scientific fraud, including cases of fabricated data in biology and medicine, but it is understandable that Goodstein prefers to address cases he knows well. Although a little “Caltech-centric”, this is an interesting and easy-to-read book, suitable for relaxing with at the end of the year.
by Richard M Weiner, CreateSpace. Paperback ISBN 9781451501728, $9.99.
Still looking for Christmas presents? Maybe one for your auntie who still doesn’t understand what you find so fascinating about physics? You may have already tried buying her popular science books, but they are sitting on a shelf, unread? Well, here is a book with an interesting basic idea: a novel about a scientist, a young genius with well developed mad streaks, a dramatic death in a computing centre, capable and less capable police forces from various countries, privately funded research organizations, CERN (as we do and don’t know it) and a theory. What if one could change the constants of nature? What if, for example, the charge of the electron could be modified in a way that it would have an influence on the size of atoms? Do smaller atoms mean smaller people, and would that solve the world’s energy crisis?
Richard Weiner, author and professor of theoretical physics, based at Marburg University in Germany and the University of Paris-Sud, France, thought that this idea was worth exploring – at least in fiction. His first “science thriller”, published in 2006 in German and in 2010 in English, first kills scientist Trevor McCallum and then traces his steps from geeky childhood via troubled adolescence to genial research and his last moments before he dies of an improbable surge in computational power. Sounds like good holiday reading?
Well, unfortunately your auntie might not be too impressed because The Miniatom Project does not really hold what it promises. While the precept is certainly original and the idea to use it in a novel to engage the non-scientist is laudable, the plot is very constructed, dialogues and characterizations clunky and the tone at times verges on being patronizing. Inconsistencies about CERN and thinly disguised CERN personalities (an attempt at a roman à clef?) will not trouble your auntie that much, but the translation is likely to grate with her. CERN certainly is fertile soil for art and fiction of all kinds but The Miniatom Project could have done with more editing before going to print.
by Lee Pullen, Mariana Barrosa and Lars Christensen (ed.), ESO. Hardback ISBN 9783923524648. €9.90. Free PDF version available from www.postcardsfromuniverse.org.
I’m a sucker for beautiful astronomy books and this one ticks all of the right boxes, right from the table of contents, which shows an artist’s view of the Earth stretching out into deep space. It is a good visualization of the depth and breadth of the science covered by the book.
This is no ordinary astronomy photo book. It is a compilation of articles by the Cosmic Diary bloggers who told their story throughout the International Year of Astronomy, 2009. As an anthology of front-line astronomy, it will soon date but it will have lasting value as a snapshot of the different researchers – first-person accounts that personalize the science and give a picture of the reality of life in research. The biographies serve to underline the truly international dimension of the research. Indeed, I am impressed by the variety of the bloggers, spanning five continents, which is no mean feat.
The array of subjects is also impressive – from a fascinating account of meteorites to the recipe for making stars. However, as the links between particle physics and astronomy become stronger, I would have liked to have read something about neutrinos or on gravitational waves, rather than a third description of how to detect exoplanets.
It is perhaps inevitable that the book’s biggest strength – its diversity – also gives rise to some weaknesses. This includes a mixed bag of writing styles and a few rather acronym-heavy, dry accounts. And the English does not always flow comfortably. But the approach of only light-handed editing is an attractive one because it allows the writers’ personalities to show through. The vast majority of the contributions are written in a chatty, friendly style and take the reader on a visual voyage of discovery.
If I chose to study physics, it was partly because I stumbled on a book in my school library about the mysteries surrounding the superluminal jets emanating from the quasar 3C273. Wow, I thought. I want to know more&ellip; I can quite imagine Postcards providing the same inspiration.
Buy it for your teenagers now!
by Edward Weiler, Abrams. Hardback ISBN 9780810989979, £19.95 ($29.95).
The publisher and NASA have joined forces to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope with the release of this inspirational “coffee-table” book. It not only pieces together the story of the telescope itself and the remarkable fruits of its labour, but also gives much prominence to the unparalleled teamwork by the men and women in conceiving, building, launching and operating Hubble – not to mention including detailed information and photographs from various NASA servicing missions.
Being the most celebrated celestial observer since Galileo assembled his first optical instruments, Hubble has without a doubt revolutionized astronomy and produced many of the most significant space photographs of our time.
In this “journey”, notable scientists describe the meaning and significance of the top-20 Hubble images and mission astronauts write about their experiences servicing it on various shuttle missions. The book includes a description of how the telescope works before presenting the wondrous world of our solar system, the stars and interstellar clouds. A later chapter explores the outer galaxies and Hubble’s quest to document them.
This book makes an ideal gift for readers young and old with an interest in science, space and astronomy. Younger readers will marvel at more than 100 classic photographs – many of them full page – and older ones will relish the accompanying text and captions.
