By Eric Poisson and Clifford M Will Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £50 $85
E-book: $68
Also available at the CERN bookshop
I heard good things about this book before I got my hands on it, and turning the pages I recognized a classic. Several random reads of its 788 large, dense pages offered a deeper insight into a novel domain, far away from my daily life where I work with the microscopic and cosmological worlds. On deeper inspection, it was nearly all that I hoped for, with only a couple of areas where I was disappointed.
The forward points out clearly that the reader should not expect any mention of cosmology. Yet the topic of the book has a clear interface with the expanding universe via its connection to our solar system, the so-called vacuole Einstein–Straus solution. Another topic that comes in too short for my taste is that of Eddington’s isotropic (Cartesian) co-ordinates. They appear on pages 268–269, and resurface in a minor mention on page 704 before the authors’ parametrized post-Newtonian approach is discussed. While this is in line with the treatment in the earlier book by one of the authors (Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics by C M Will, CUP 1993), it seems to me that this area has grown in significance in recent years.
The book is not about special relativity, but it is a topic that must of course appear. However, it is odd that Box 4.1 on pages 191–192 on “Tests of Special Relativity” relies on publications from 1977, 1966, 1941 and 1938. I can feel the pain of colleagues – including friends in particle and nuclear physics – who have worked hard during recent decades to improve limits by many orders of magnitude. And on page 190, I see a dead point in the history of special relativity – authors, please note. Lorentz failed to write down the transformation named after him by Poincaré, who guessed the solution to the invariance of Maxwell’s equations, a guess that escaped Lorentz. However, Einstein was first to publish his own brilliant derivation.
We know that no book is perfect and complete, entirely without errors and omissions. So the question to be asked is, how useful is this book to you? To find the answer, I’d recommend reading the highly articulate preface available, for example, under “Front Matter” on the publisher’s website. I quote a few words because I could not say it better: “This book is about approximations to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and their applications to planetary motion around the Sun, to the timing of binary pulsars, to gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes and to many real-life, astrophysical systems…this book is therefore the physics of weak gravitational fields.”
Personally, I found in the book what I was looking for: the technical detail of the physics of large objects such as planets and stars, which can be as many times larger than the proton as they are smaller than the universe. I could not put the book down, despite its weight (1.88 kg). Some might prefer the Kindle edition, but I would hope for a shrunk-silk volume. Whichever you choose or is available, in dollars per page this book is a bargain. It is a great read that will enrich any personal library.
By Olaf Behnke, Kevin Kröninger, Grégory Schott and Thomas Schörner-Sadenius (eds) Wiley
Paperback: £60 €72
E-book: £48.99 €61.99
Also available at the CERN bookshop
This book is actually 11 books in one, with 16 authors, four of whom are also editors. All are high-energy physicists, including one theorist, and all are experts in their assigned areas of data analysis, so the general level of the book is excellent. In addition, the editors have done a good job putting the 11 chapters together so that they work as a single book, and they have even given it a global index. Still, each chapter has its own author(s) and its own style, and I will comment on the individual contributions that I found most interesting.
Roger Barlow (“Fundamental Concepts”) gives a good introduction to the foundations, but surprisingly he has some trouble with frequentist probability, which is the one that physicists understand best because it is the probability of quantum mechanics. Instead of taking an example from physics, where experiments are repeatable and frequentist probability is applicable, he uses life insurance and finds problems. But his example for Bayes’s theorem works fine with frequentist probabilities, even if they are not from physics.
Olaf Behnke and Lorenzo Moneta (“Parameter Estimation”) have produced a useful practical guide for their chapter. The treatment is remarkably complete and concise. I especially liked figure 2.9, which illustrates the fit of a typical histogram to a single peak, showing the value of chi-square as a function of peak position across the whole range of the abscissa, with a local minimum at every fluctuation in the data.
Luc Demortier (“Interval Estimation”) displays an impressive knowledge of both frequentist and Bayesian methodologies, and is careful to list the good and bad features of both in a level of detail that I have seen nowhere else, and did not expect to find in a “practical guide”. He succeeds in presenting a balanced view overall, even though his personal prior shows through in the first sentence, where the point estimate is intuitively defined as “in some sense the most likely value”, instead of the more tangible “in some sense the value closest to the true value”.
The most remarkable aspect of this book is found in the chapters devoted to topics that are not usually covered in books on statistics. Therefore “Classification” (by Helge Voss) is treated separately from “Hypothesis Testing” (by Grégory Schott), describing techniques that are common in data analysis but not used in traditional statistics. In “Unfolding”, Volker Blobel reminds us that statistics is really an inverse problem, although it is not usually treated as such. There are two separate chapters on “Theory Uncertainties” and other “Systematic Uncertainties”, a chapter on “Constrained Fits” and two chapters on “Applications”, some of which duplicate subjects treated elsewhere, but of course from a different point of view. In the concluding chapter, Harrison Prosper, in his inimitable style, takes the reader on “a journey to the field of astronomy”.
In summary, this ambitious project has produced a useful book where experimental physicists will find expert knowledge about a range of topics that are indispensable to their work of data analysis.
On 19 December, CERN’s director-general, Rolf Heuer, and the chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Ansar Parvez, signed in Islamabad the agreement admitting the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to associate membership of CERN, in the presence of prime minister Nawaz Sharif and diplomatic representatives of CERN member states. This followed approval by CERN Council to proceed towards associate membership for Pakistan during its 172nd session held in September 2014. The agreement is still subject to ratification by the government of Pakistan.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan and CERN signed a co-operation agreement in 1994. The signature of several protocols followed, and Pakistan contributed to building the CMS and ATLAS experiments. Today, Pakistan contributes to the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS experiments, and operates a Tier-2 computing centre in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid that helps to process and analyse the massive amounts of data that the experiments generate. Pakistan is also involved in accelerator developments, making it an important partner for CERN.
The associate membership of Pakistan will open a new era of co-operation that will strengthen the long-term partnership between CERN and the Pakistani scientific community. Associate membership will allow Pakistan to participate in the governance of CERN, through attending the meetings of the CERN Council. Moreover, it will allow Pakistani scientists to become CERN staff members, and to participate in CERN’s training and career-development programmes. Finally, it will allow Pakistani industry to bid for CERN contracts, therefore opening up opportunities for industrial collaboration in areas of advanced technology.
During its December meeting, Council also welcomed the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, JINR, for the first time as an observer to Council, as part of a reciprocal arrangement that also sees CERN becoming an observer at JINR. Founded as an international organization at Dubna near Moscow in 1956, JINR soon forged a close partnership with CERN that saw exchanges of personnel and equipment throughout the cold war and beyond.
Never has such an illustrious career at CERN hung from so slender a thread of improbability. He was in Genoa, I was in Geneva. Were we destined to meet? In Bristol? As a result of some tiny chance? His final day of a one-year sabbatical. My first day of a visit. All alone on his last evening, Emilio wanted to say goodbye to Bristol and went to a bar. Out of hundreds of options, I ended up in the same bar…and got a warm welcome. I described the new g-2 experiment, which was just starting to roll: the first ever muon storage ring at 1.2 GeV to dilate the muon lifetime to 27 μs and see more precession cycles. Simon van der Meer was on board but no one else. Emilio loved fundamental physics, and there and then he offered to join the project, visiting CERN from Genoa and later becoming a full-time member of staff. Little did I know that I would be making speeches and writing articles in his honour: Chevalier of Legion of Honour of France and Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy. Francis J M Farley
Emilio read physics at the University of Genoa, where he stayed after receiving his doctorate in July 1956. Within a small team, he worked mainly on technical aspects of visual particle detectors, first with gas bubble chambers – based on using a supersaturated solution of gas in a liquid at room temperature – and diffusion chambers. By the early 1960s, he had moved on with some of his collaborators to study proton and meson interactions in nuclear emulsions, and participated in the International Co-operative Emulsion Flights, which took two large stacks of emulsion plates high into the atmosphere to detect the interactions of energetic cosmic rays. This international collaborative effort included the Bristol group of Cecil Powell, recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on emulsions and their use in the discovery of the particle now known as the pion in cosmic rays.
So it was not surprising that Emilio arrived in Bristol as a NATO postdoctoral fellow in 1962/1963. There, his chance meeting with Farley in Bristol in 1963 set him on course to CERN. When he offered to join the g-2 experiment, Farley accepted with pleasure, and soon Emilio started travelling to Geneva from Genoa, becoming a research associate at CERN in 1964. From the beginning he insisted on understanding everything in depth. He wrote Fortran programs, checked the calculations and found some mistakes, which luckily for the future of the experiment were not lethal.
Emilio’s enthusiasm was contagious, and he and Farley gradually assembled a small team. Farley recalls: “There were many difficulties, but eventually it worked and we measured the anomalous moment of the muon to 270 ppm. The result disagreed with theory by 1.7σ but we were sure of our number (confirmed by the next experiment) and we published anyway. (The fashionable shibboleth is that you need 5σ for an effect; true if you are looking for a bump in a wiggly graph, which might be anywhere. But for one number 2–3σ is important and anything over 3σ is huge). The discrepancy was enough to worry the theorists, who set to work and discovered a new correction. Then they agreed with us. This was a triumph for the experiment.”
In 1967 Farley moved to a job in England and Emilio became group leader, having joined the CERN staff in November 1966. Together with John Bailey they discovered the magic energy, 3.1 GeV, at which electric fields do not affect the spin precession. This led to a new muon storage ring with a uniform magnetic field and vertical focusing using an electric quadrupole field. Emilio masterminded this much larger project, creating a warm happy atmosphere and encouraging new ideas. The muon precession could now be followed out to 500 μs and g-2 was measured to 7 ppm. The team had the right number again (confirmed by the later measurement at Brookhaven National Laboratory) and this time it agreed with the theory.
While the g-2 saga was coming to an end, Emilio and Luigi Radicati, who was then a visiting scientist at CERN, became interested in the possibility of detecting gravitational waves by exploiting suitably coupled superconducting RF cavities. The idea was to detect the change of the cavity Q-value induced by gravitational waves. They were joined by Francesco Pegoraro and CERN’s Philippe Bernard, and published papers analysing the principle in 1978/1979. It was an unconventional idea, which Emilio continued to consider and improve on and off with various collaborators for the next quarter of a century. However, at the end of the 1970s a much larger project lay on CERN’s horizon.
In November 1978, John Adams – then CERN’s executive director-general – decided to push R&D on superconducting RF with a view to increasing the energy reach of the proposed Large Electron–Positron (LEP) collider. He asked Philippe Bernard and Herbert Lengeler to put together a research programme, and they in turn proposed that Emilio should co-ordinate collaboration with outside laboratories because of his “vivid interest in RF superconductivity” and his “excellent contacts” in the field. The result was that in spring 1979, Emilio became team leader of the development programme at CERN, and responsible for co-ordination with other laboratories – in Genoa, Karlsruhe, Orsay and Wuppertal.
The development work at CERN led to superconducting cavities that could achieve the necessary high electric-field gradients, and the team went on to design and build, in collaboration with European industries, the system of superconducting RF that was eventually deployed in LEP during the 1990s. In 1986, Emilio and others proposed the installation of a maximum of 384 superconducting cavities to reach an energy of at least 220 GeV in the centre-of-mass. In the end 288 such cavities were installed, and LEP eventually reached a total energy of 208 GeV. Emilio would later express sadness that the collider’s energy was never brought to its fullest potential with the maximum number of cavities.
Leader of LEP
However, he was to take on a still more significant role in 1980, when at the suggestion of the new director-general, Herwig Schopper, CERN Council designated him LEP project leader. With Schopper’s agreement, Emilio began by setting up the LEP Management Board, consisting of the best experts at CERN, in all of the various aspects, from magnets, RF and vacuum to civil engineering and experimental halls. The board met one day a week throughout the period of LEP’s construction, discussing all of the decisions that needed to be taken, including the technical specifications for contracts with industry. Schopper would regularly join in, mainly to observe and participate in the decision-making process, which took place in a warm and enthusiastic atmosphere.
The main aspect of the project in which Emilio had no experience was civil engineering, but one of the early major issues concerned the exact siting of the tunnel, which in the initial plans was to pass for 12 km beneath some 1000 m of water-bearing limestone in the Jura mountains. While this would avoid the larger communities in France and Switzerland, it presented formidable tunnelling challenges. Rather than downsize, Emilio decided to look into locating the ring further from the mountains. This needed crucial support from the local people, and he was instrumental in setting up regular meetings with the communes around CERN. The result was that in the final design, the LEP tunnel passed for only 3.3 km under the Jura, beneath 200 m of limestone at most.
This final design was approved in December 1981 and construction of the tunnel started in 1983. It was not without incident: when water burst into the part of the tunnel underneath the Jura, it formed a river that took six months to eliminate, and the smooth planning for construction and installation became a complex juggling act. Nevertheless by July 1988, the first sector was installed completely. A test with beam proved that the machine was indeed well designed, and just over a year later, the first collisions were observed on 13 August 1989.
Following the completion of the construction phase of LEP, and the end of his successful mandate as leader of the LEP project, Emilio began to focus again on the detection of gravitational waves, an interest that had continued even while he was a director at CERN, when he supported the installation of the EXPLORER gravitational-wave detector at the laboratory in 1984. He was nominated director of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1991, where he had been named professor a decade earlier, and served as such for the following four years, retiring from CERN in 1992. At Pisa, he played a key role in supporting approval of Virgo – the laser-based gravitational-wave detector adopted by INFN and CNRS, which is currently running near Cascina, Pisa.
Emilio’s love for physics problems lasted throughout his life in science – a life during which warmth and welcome radiated. He knew how to switch people on. Now, sadly, this bright light is dimmed, but the afterglow remains and will be with us for many years.
After a long illness, Emilio Picasso passed away on 12 October. One of the earliest and most outstanding staff members of CERN, he made remarkable contributions to the prodigious success of the organization for more than 50 years.
Born in Genoa on 9 July 1927, Emilio first studied mathematics, followed by two years of physics. After his doctorate he became assistant professor for experimental physics at the University of Genoa, and began research in atomic physics before changing to particle physics.
Short stays with the betatron at Torino and with the electron synchrotron at Frascati provided him with his first experiences with particle accelerators. He then went to Bristol in the years 1962/1963, where he joined the group of Cecil Powell, who had received the Nobel prize in 1950 for investigating cosmic radiation using photographic emulsions and discovering the π meson. There Emilio met Francis Farley who told him that he intended to measure at CERN the anomalous magnetic moment of muons circulating in a storage ring. After some drinks they became friends, and Emilio decided to join Farley on the CERN experiment.
The measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment – or more precisely the deviation of its value from the Bohr magneton, expressed as “g-2” – yields an extremely important quantity for testing quantum electrodynamics (QED). Emilio was attracted by this experiment because it matched two different aspects of his thinking. He was fascinated by fundamental questions, and at the same time the experiment required new technologies for magnets.
From 1963, Emilio commuted between Genoa and CERN, becoming a research associate in 1964 to work on the g-2 experiment and a CERN staff member in 1966. In addition to Farley, John Bailey and Simon van der Meer joined the group, which Emilio was later to lead. The measurements went on for 15 years at two successive storage rings (the second with Guido Petrucci and Frank Krienen), and achieved an incredible accuracy of 7 ppm, so becoming one of the most famous precision tests of QED.
In 1978, Luigi Radicati convinced Emilio to participate in an experiment to look for gravitational waves produced by particles circulating in a storage ring. Superconducting RF cavities were to be used as detectors. The attempt was unsuccessful, but it gave Emilio the opportunity to get to know the technology of superconducting cavities – knowledge that was to serve him extremely well later at the Large Electron–Positron collider (LEP).
In 1981, the LEP project was approved by CERN Council, alas under very difficult conditions, i.e. with a reduced and constant budget. In addition, the requisite personnel had to be found among the staff of the newly unified CERN I and CERN II laboratories. Under such conditions it was not easy to find the right person to lead the LEP project. Several outstanding accelerator experts were available at CERN, and it would have been an obvious step to appoint one of them as project leader. However, because it became necessary to reassign about a third of the CERN staff to new tasks – implying that personal relations established across many years had to be broken – I considered the human problems as dominant. Hence I appointed Emilio as project leader for LEP, a decision that was greeted by many with amazement. I considered his human qualities for this task to be more important than some explicit technical know-how. Emilio was respected by the scientists as well as by the engineers. He was prepared to listen to people, and his moderating temper, his honesty and reliability, and last but not least his Mediterranean warmth, were indispensable for the successful construction and operation of what was by far the largest accelerator of its time. His name will always remain linked with this unique project, LEP – a true testament to Emilio’s skills as a scientist and as a project leader.
After his retirement I visited Emilio often in a small office in the theory division, where he had settled to study fundamental physics questions again. But he also took up other charges. One of the most important tasks was the directorship of the Scuola Normale Superiore at Pisa from 1991 to 1995, where he had been nominated professor in 1981 – a commitment that he could not fulfil at the time because of his CERN engagements.
Emilio received many distinctions, among them the title of Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica, one of the highest orders of the Italian state.
Despite the heavy demands of his job he always cared about his family, and in return his wife Mariella gave him loving support in difficult times.
We all regret that sadly Emilio was not well enough to enjoy the enormous recent success of CERN. Science has lost a great physicist and many of us a dear friend.
I first came to CERN as a student in the mid 1980s, and spent an entrancing summer learning the extent of my lack of knowledge in the field of physics (considerable!) and meeting fellow students from across Europe and further afield. It was a life-changing experience and the beginning of my love affair with CERN. On graduation I returned as a research fellow working on the Large Electron–Positron collider, but at the end of three wonderful years I reluctantly came to the realization that the world of research was not for me. I moved into a more commercial world, and have been working in the field of investments for more than 20 years.
However, as the saying goes, you can take the girl out of CERN but you can’t take CERN out of the girl. I stayed in touch, and when, a few years ago, I met Rolf Heuer, the current director-general, and heard his vision of creating a foundation that would expand CERN’s ability to reach a wider audience, I was keen to be involved.
Science is, in some respects, a field of study that is open largely to the most privileged only. To do it well requires resources – trained educators, good facilities, textbooks, access to research and, of course, opportunity. These are not available universally. I was fortunate to become a summer student at CERN, but that is possible for a lucky few only, and there are many places in the world where even basic access to textbooks or research libraries is limited or non-existent.
And to those outside of the field of science, there is not always a good understanding of why these things matter. The return on a country’s investment in science will come years into the future, beyond short-term electoral cycles. There can appear to be more immediate and pressing concerns competing for limited spending, so advocacy of the wider benefits to society of investment in science is important.
The case for pure scientific research is sometimes difficult to explain. This is not just down to the concepts themselves, which are beyond most of us to understand at anything but a superficial level. It is also because the most fundamental research does not necessarily know in advance what its ultimate usefulness or practicality might be. “Trust me, there will be some” does not sound convincing, even if experience shows that this generally turns out to be the case.
Communication of the tangible benefits of scientific discovery, which can occur a long time after the initial research, is an important part of securing the ongoing support of society for research endeavours, particularly in times of strained financial resources.
After many months of hard work, the CERN & Society Foundation was established in June 2014. Its purpose is “to spread the CERN spirit of scientific curiosity for the inspiration and benefit of society”. It aims to excite young people in the understanding and pursuit of science; to provide researchers in less privileged parts of the world with the tools and access they need to enable them to engage with the wider scientific community; to advocate the benefit of pure scientific research to key influencers; to inspire cultural activities and the arts; and to further the development of science in practical applications for the wider benefit of society as a whole, whether in medicine, technology or the environment. The excitement generated by the LHC gives us a unique opportunity to contribute to society in ways that cannot be done within the constraints of dedicated member-state funding.
To translate this vision into reality will, of course, take time. The foundation currently has a three-person board, made up of myself, Peter Jenni and the director-general. It has benefited from some initial generous donations to get it off the ground and allow us to fund our first projects.
The foundation benefits from the advice of the Fundraising Advisory Board (FAB), which ensures compliance with CERN’s Ethical Policy for Fundraising. It filters through ideas for projects looking for support, and recommends those that are likely to have the highest impact. The FAB, chaired by Markus Nordberg, consists of CERN staff who help us to prioritize the areas on which to focus. In our early years, we have three main themes where we are looking for support: education and outreach; innovation and knowledge exchange; and culture and the arts. With the help of CERN’s Development Office, we are seeking support from foundations, corporate donors and individuals. No donation is too large or small.
Matteo Castoldi, heading the Development Office, has been instrumental in the practical side of the foundation, and is a good person to contact if you have ideas for a project, want help in formalizing a proposal for FAB or would like to discuss any aspect of the CERN & Society Foundation. Our website is up and running – please take a look to find out more, and if you would like to make a donation just click on the link. Thank you in advance for your support.
By Gerard ’t Hooft and Stefan Vandoren (translated by Saskia Eisberg-’t Hooft) World Scientific
Hardback: £31
Paperback: £16
E-book: £12
Also available at the CERN bookshop
With powers of 10, one cannot fail to think of the iconic 1970s film made by Charles and Ray Eames – a journey through the universe departing from a picnic blanket somewhere in Chicago. However, this book is not about distance scales, rather time. And the universe it reveals is one of constant turmoil and evolution. No vast empty wastelands here, where nothing changes across many powers of 10. Journeying across the time scales, we discover a universe teeming with activity at every stage – processing, ticking, cycling, continuously moving, changing, surprising.
Every page brims with the authors’ evident enthusiasm for the workings of the universe, be it the esoteric or the more mundane. I would never have expected to read a book where cosmic microwave background radiation sits side by side with the problems of traffic congestion in the US (time = 10 trillion seconds).
Leaping in powers of 10, the book races through stories of life, the Earth and the solar system, and on to physical processes quadrillions of times the age of the universe itself. The largest and smallest of time scales transport the reader to the strange and fascinating. Just as with distance scales, the very small and the very large are intimately entwined.
There is a gap between the more anecdotal and the more scientific. Record sprint times (time = 10 seconds) and the rhythm of our biological clock (time = 100,000 seconds) are light interludes in contrast with the decay modes of the ηc meson (time = 10 yoctoseconds) and the Lamb shift (time = 1 nanosecond). While this eclecticism is part of the book’s charm, some scientific baggage is required to enjoy the contents fully.
Where the book fails, is in the design. Visually, it is a little dull. With disparate styles of graphic illustrations, many taken from Wikipedia, the image quality is not up to that of the text. A clever design could take readers on a visual voyage, adding to the impact of the writing. The story warrants this effort.
It is striking that mysteries exist at every time scale, not only at the extremes – be it the high magnetic field of pulsars (time = 1 second), the explanation of high-temperature superconductors (time = 10 million seconds) or the origin of water on Earth (time = 100 quadrillion seconds). The book reveals the extraordinary complexity of our universe – it is a fascinating journey.
By Gianfranco Bertone Oxford University Press
Hardback: £19.99
Also available as an e-book, and at the CERN bookshop
With the discovery of a Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, the concept of mass has changed from an intrinsic property of each particle to the result of an interaction between the particles and the omnipresent Higgs field: the stronger that interaction is, the more it slows down the particle, which effectively behaves as if it is massive. This experimental validation of a theoretical idea born 50 years ago is a major achievement in elementary particle physics, and confirms the Standard Model as the cornerstone in our understanding of the universe. However, as is often the case in science, there is more to mass than meets the eye: most of the mass of the universe is currently believed to exist in a form that has, so far, remained hidden from our best detectors.
Gianfranco Bertone seems to have been travelling through the dark side of the universe for quite a while, and I am glad that he has taken the time to write this beautiful account of his journey. The book is easy to read, the scientific observations, puzzles and discussions being interspersed with interesting short annotations from history, art, poetry, etc. Readers should enjoy the non-technical tour through general relativity, gravitational lensing, cosmology, particle physics, etc. In particular, one learns that space–time bends light rays travelling through the universe, and that we can deduce the properties of a lens by studying the images it distorts. At the end of this learning curve we reach the conclusion that “we have a problem”: no matter where we look, and how we look, we always infer the existence of much more mass than we can see. Bertone expresses it poetically: “The cosmic scaffolding that grew the galaxies we live in and keeps them together is made of a form of matter that is unknown to us, and far more abundant in the universe than any form of matter we have touched, seen, or experienced in any way.”
The second half of the book wanders through the efforts devised to indentify the nature of dark matter, through the direct or indirect detection of dark-matter particles, with the LHC experiments, deep underground detectors, or detectors orbiting the Earth. As more data are collected and interpreted, more regions of parameters defining the properties of the dark-matter particles are excluded. In a few years, the data accumulated at the LHC and in astroparticle experiments will be such that, for many dark-matter candidates, “we must either discover them or rule them out”. The book is an excellent guide to anyone interested in witnessing that important step in the progress of fundamental physics.
By Michael Rodgers World Scientific
Hardback: £50
Paperback: £25
E-book: £19
In Publishing and the Advancement of Science, retired science editor Michael Rodgers take us on an autobiographical tour of the world of science publishing, taking in textbooks, trade paperbacks and popular science books along the way. The narrative is detailed and chronological: a blow-by-blow account of Rodgers’ career at various publishing houses, with the challenges, differences of opinion and downright arguments that it takes to get a science book to press.
Rodgers was part of the revolution in popular-science publishing that started in the 1970s, and he conveys with palpable excitement the experience of discovering great authors or reading brilliant typescripts for the first time. Readers with an interest in science will recognize such titles as Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene or Peter Atkins’ Physical Chemistry, both of which Rodgers worked on. Frustratingly, he falls short of providing real insight into what makes a popular-science book great. There is a niggling sense of “I know one when I see one”, but a lack of analysis of the writing.
Rodgers’ first job in publishing – as “field editor” for Oxford University Press (OUP), starting in 1969 – had him visiting universities around the UK, commissioning academics to write books. Anecdotes about the inner workings of OUP at the time take the reader back to a charming, pre-web way of working: telephone calls and letters rather than e-mails and attachments, and responding to authors in days rather than minutes. The culture of publishing at the time is conveyed with wry humour. OUP sent memos about the proper use of the semicolon, and had a puzzlingly arcane filing system, which added to the sense of mustiness.
A section on the development of Dawkins’ seminal The Selfish Gene threw up interesting tidbits – altercations about the nature of the gene, and a discussion about what makes a good title – but I was less interested in the analysis of the US market for chemistry textbooks, or such tips as “The best time to publish a mainstream coursebook is in January, to allow maximum time for promotion.”
At times, the level of autobiographical detail dilutes Rodgers’ sense of intellectual excitement about the scientific ideas in his books. The measure of a book’s success in terms of copies sold and years in print makes publishing a commercial rather than intellectual exercise, which to some extent left me disappointed. And although Rodgers worked part time, freelance or was made redundant at various points in his career, apart from a brief section in the epilogue, he seems rather blind to the changes sweeping the publishing industry, with the advent of free online content.
Those interested in the world of publishing, with a special interest in science, will find much to like about this book. But although Rodgers provides quirky tidbits about how some famous books came to be, it falls short of telling us what makes them great.
By Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon Prometheus Books
Hardback: $25.92
The birth of modern physics coincides with the lifespans of Michael Faraday (1791–1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879). During these years, electric, magnetic and optical phenomena were unified in a single description by introducing the concept of the field – a word coined by Faraday himself while vividly summarizing an amazing series of observations in his Experimental Researches in Electricity. Faraday – a mathematical illiterate – was the first to intuit that, thanks to the field concept, the foundations of the physical world are imperceptible to our senses. All that we know about these foundations – Maxwell would add – are their mathematical relationships to things that we can feel and touch.
Today, the field concept – both classically and quantum mechanically – is unavoidable, and this recent book by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon sheds fresh light on the origins of electromagnetism by scrutinizing the mutual interactions of Victorian scientists living through a period characterized by great social and scientific mobility. Faraday started as a chemist, became an experimental physicist, then later a businessman and even an inspector of lighthouses – an important job at that time. Maxwell began his career as a mathematician, became what we would call today a theoretical physicist, and then founded the Cavendish Laboratory while holding the chair of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge.
The first seven chapters focus on Faraday’s contributions, while the remainder are more directly related to Maxwell and his scientific descendants or, as the authors like to say, the Maxwellians. The reader encounters not only the ideas and original texts of Faraday and Maxwell, but also a series of amazing scientists, such as the chemist Humphry Davy (Faraday’s mentor), as well as an assorted bunch of mathematicians and physicists including David Forbes (Maxwell’s teacher), John Tyndall, Peter Tait, George Airy, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Oliver Heaviside. All of these names are engraved in the memories of students for contributions sometimes not directly related to electromagnetism, and it is therefore interesting to read the opinions of these leading scientists on the newly born field theory.
The historical account might at first seem a little biased, but it is nonetheless undeniable that the field concept took shape essentially between England and Scotland. The first hints for the unification of magnetic and electric phenomena can be traced back to William Gilbert, who in 1600 described electric and magnetic phenomena in a single treatise called De Magnete. More than 200 years later, the Maxwell equations (together with the Hertz experiment) finally laid to rest the theory of “action at a distance” of André-Marie Ampère and Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.
The last speculative paper written by Faraday (and sent to Maxwell for advice) dealt with the gravitational field itself. Maxwell replied that the gravitational lines of force could “weave a web across the sky” and “guide the stars in their courses”. General relativity was on the doorstep.
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