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Wednesday, June 03, 2015

The Higgs Boson: Searching for the God ParticleThe Higgs Boson: Searching for the God Particle by Scientific American
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When ebooks became a happening thing, Scientific American started putting together collections of articles following a selected theme. To date, there are 38 volumes and this is one of them.
The Higgs Boson: Searching for the God Particle is a collection of both contemporary and past articles that feature a discussion of the theory behind and discovery of the Higgs particle and the effects that both have had on the development of physics past and future.
The articles themselves are excellent as they are from the archives of the magazine. They are written for the intelligent layperson with an interest in the subject. Formal mathematics is not necessary to understand the articles as written, although it should be said that a deep understanding of the subject matter requires a great deal of mathematical preparation. At the same time, the subject is not "dumbed down." The attentive reader will find that re-reading sections of each article necessary to grasp the concepts explained.
I do have one very serious complaint about the book: It is poorly edited for typographical errors and formatting. In fact, the editing is downright sloppy. It's as if an editor at Scientific American asked a very inexperienced person to convert the digital articles into book form and check for errors caused by the conversion. Some articles have upward of 40 errors, while some have no errors at all.
If you can get past the aggravating lack of typographic editing, this is an excellent read. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in what all the hoopla about the Higgs particle is all about.

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