The God Particle

Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi, Houghton-Mifflin 1993, Revised 2006

Leon Lederman is a Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist who has been Director of Fermilab and has been in close touch with the whole development of the Standard Model of particle physics from the beginning of the large accelerator era. It is a good and entertaining inside view of the world of particle physics, but one has to be a little careful in taking information away from this work because Lederman is such a jokester that he could be pulling your leg.

1. The Invisible Soccer Ball

2. The First Particle Physicist

p25 A casual description of Fermilab

p28 Interesting comments about 137, from the fine-structure constant 1/137.

p32 Democritus is posited as the first particle physicist, and from p32 -58 is a dialog between Lederman and Democritus. It rambles through the history of the atom concept, but at page 50 there is actually a good outline of the standard model ending up with talk about the Higgs boson.

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3. Looking for the Atom: The Mechanics

p81 Describes Kepler as frail, neurotic, nearsighted man, along with a fairly straightforward description of his science. A little disturbing that he seems to have high integrity in describing the science, but has this edge of painting those of religious faith as abnormal.

p84 He really has made Galileo a scientific hero, and rightly so, and gives the flavor of really having studied the history of Galileo. Calls him the Sagan of his day. But then he drops the line "The Church sentenced him to life imprisonment for his astronomical beliefs." That sounds like it is straight out of the two bogus histories of the 19th century which sought to depict science and faith as being in all-out war with each other. After this really skewed history of Galileo and the church I'm finding this trend of depicting faith and science as enemies offensive. Sometimes this joker is not very funny.

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4. Still Looking for the Atom: Chemists and Electricians

5. The Naked Atom

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6. Accelerators: They Smash Atoms, Don't They?

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7. A-tom!

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8. The God Particle at Last

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9. Inner Space, Outer Space, and the Time Before Time

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