Present at the Creation, Amir D. Aczel
Present at the Creation, Amir D. Aczel
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Present at the Creation
Discovering the Higgs Boson

Author: Amir D. Aczel

Narrator: Byron Wagner

Unabridged: 8 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/05/2010


Synopsis

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely hot and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the first trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. The collider is now crashing protons at record energy levels never created by scientists before, and it will reach even higher levels by 2013. Its superconducting magnets guide two beams of protons in opposite directions around the track. After accelerating the beams to 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light, it collides the protons head-on, annihilating them in a flash of energy sufficient—in accordance with Einstein’s elegant statement of mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2—to coalesce into a shower of particles and phenomena that have not existed since the first moments of creation. Within the LHC’s detectors, scientists hope to see empirical confirmation of key theories in physics and cosmology.

In telling the story of what is perhaps the most anticipated experiment in the history of science, Amir D. Aczel takes us inside the control rooms at CERN at key moments when an international team of top researchers begins to discover whether this multibillion-euro investment will fulfill its spectacular promise. Through the eyes and words of the men and women who conceived and built CERN and the LHC—and with the same clarity and depth of knowledge he demonstrated in the bestselling Fermat’s Last Theorem—Aczel enriches all of us with a firm grounding in the scientific concepts we will need to appreciate the discoveries that will almost certainly spring forth when the full power of this great machine is finally unleashed.

Will the Higgs boson make its breathlessly awaited appearance, confirming at last the Standard Model of particles and their interactions that is among the great theoretical achievements of twentieth-century physics? Will the hidden dimensions posited by string theory be revealed? Will we at last identify the nature of the dark matter that makes up more than 90 percent of the cosmos? With Present at the Creation, written by one of today’s finest popular interpreters of basic science, we can all follow the progress of an experiment that promises to greatly satisfy the curiosity of anyone who ever concurred with Einstein when he said, “I want to know God’s thoughts—the rest is details.”

About The Author

AMIR D. ACZEL is the author of fourteen books, including the international bestseller Fermat’s Last Theorem, which has been translated into twenty-two languages. He is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sotiris

Is a short story of CERN and those lovely neutrinos that we cannot see but are going thru our body every sec..........more

Goodreads review by Hind

Not bad, except I thought it was about the LHC (which it isn’t) and some sloppy word choice.......more

I wanted to read this book to find out what all the "God Particle" fuss was about. I probably understood about 10% of this book, but what I did understand was pretty mind-blowing. Here are some facts I learned about the LHC: It's the largest machine ever built- a 16.5 mile "race track" beneath the gr......more

Goodreads review by Ross

I thought that this was a very good oveview of the current state of theory in modern physics centered around the large Hadron Collider. The author gives a quick historical review of the development of what is called "modern physics" and the role of particle accelerators in the various discoveries ab......more

It was a pretty basic read. The information was good although some of the examples seemed perhaps wrong for what was being described? The paperclip example? I felt like that had too many flaws to gloss over, and there were others that were likewise perhaps unhelpful. Overall though it was better tha......more


Quotes

"A fascinating discussion of research at the cutting-edge of physics."--Arthur I. Miller, author of Deciphering the Cosmic Number