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The quest began in 430 B.C. when a Greek philosopher smelled
bread baking and imagined that an invisible particle might be the building block
of all matter. He called it the a-tom -- "that which cannot be cut"
-- and its pursuit has become science's longest-running experiment. Now, in a
book of dazzling originality, Nobel laureate Leon Lederman tells the story of
the 2,500 year search for the answer to an ancient question: what is the world
made of? Lederman joined this search in the 1950s, and
his many contributions to our understanding of subatomic architecture have ranked
him among the foremost experimental physicists in the world. The God Particle
is yet another remarkable achievement: drawing on a lifetime of research and teaching,
Lederman shines such a clear light on the mysteries of matter that they are at
last understandable to everyone. With great wit and erudition, he describes the
long strings of Eureka moments that have brought us so tantalizingly close to
unlocking rthe last secrets of the universe. Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Rutherford,
and Einstein are just a few of the heroes in Lederman's tale, each one a brilliant
detective looking for clues behind the veil of matter. The
past fifty years have brought the development of the most complex experimental
tool ever built -- the particle accelerator, an immensely powerful knife that
cuts matter into quarks and leptons and reveals the forces that drive them. Lederman
explains how accelerators work and argues passionately for the need for a huge
new machine that can find the ultimate a-tom. He believes that this particle --
the God Particle -- orchestrates the cosmic symphony, and he dreams of its discovery,
hoping it will reduce the laws of physics to an equation so simple that it can
fit on a t-shirt. Using humor, metaphor, and vivid storytelling,
Leon Lederman takes us on an adventure into an invisible world. The God Particle
is a celebration of human curiosity, a thrilling book by a man whose genius for
discovering the secrets of the universe is matched by his gift for illuminating
the wonders of science. Leon Lederman discovered several
pieces of the subatomic puzzle, and in 1988 he shared the Nobel Prize for physics.
He was director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from 1979 to 1989
and architect of the plan to construct the Superconducting Super Collider now
being built in Waxahachie, Texas. A longtime educator, he is chairman of the board
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and co-author with
David Schramm of From Quarks to the Cosmos. Now a professor at Illinois
Institute of Technology, he lives in the Hyde Park section of Chicago. Dick
Teresi is the co-author of The Three-Pound Universe
and Lasar. Formerly the editor
of Omni magazine, he lives
in Amherst, Massachusetts. |
