It may be time to accept that particle physics may be just a bit over my head. By the time we get to “strange quarks” and “beauty quarks” I may be justified in thinking that those physicists are just messing with me.
“The first anomaly to emerge related to a specific type of decay where a beauty quark transforms into a strange quark (that’s its formal designation, not just a statement of opinion) along with two muons, those heavy cousins of the electron.”
Magnetic muons, missing antisocial neutrinos, muon neutrinos, pions, kaons, leptons, strong and weak forces, the standard model, beauty quarks, strange quarks — the list goes on and on and I’m starting to wonder if physics parties may just involve a bunch of quite interesting substances.
“Now, there is nothing that gets particle physicists more hot and bothered than a bump in a graph.”
The alphabet soup of tiny particles aside, I was fascinated by candid accounts of attempted physics breakthroughs (wouldn’t it be fun to find something new in physics and upend our understanding of reality?) that got thwarted by experiments agreeing with existing theories and not the new shiny ones, and the thresholds needed to show that the findings are actually significant and not just wishful thinking and chance (five sigmas!), and how sometimes experiment disagreeing with the theory may be due to flaws in the experiment and not the theory itself.
“The stakes are high, both for our understanding of nature and for the future of neutrino physics as a whole. Whatever happens, it’s clear that nature’s most elusive ingredients will continue to beguile, confuse, and fascinate for years to come. And if we keep searching, experimenting, and theorizing, there’s a chance that one day, perhaps not too far from now, they will give us our first opening into the dark universe, setting us off on a thrilling new journey of discovery.”
Harry Cliff presents the confusing (at least to me) subject very enthusiastically, to say the least, and patiently explains what must be elementary to him but a dense thicket of stuff to me — and it indeed starts making sense (well, for five minutes until my brain purges itself in favor of something easier), and that’s a skill. He’s frank about things that got people (including him) overexcited but did not win against the established theory, and the explanation of how scientific breakthroughs do NOT happen to me was just as interesting as if they had.
“[…] Whenever you are working at the limits of knowledge, you run the risk of making mistakes, but errors can be the greatest training of all. When I was an undergraduate, one of my tutors, a white-bearded wire of a man named Bob Butcher, had a simple phrase stuck above his desk that has stayed with me: “I’ve learned so much from my mistakes, I think I’ll make another.”
I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of or will quite understand much about particle physics, but nevertheless this was quite interesting, even if I will forget it all shortly.
3.5 stars.
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Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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