Smashing Physics

Written by a physicist who works at CERN, this is a firsthand look at the hunt for the Higgs boson, billed as the first popular account from inside the project. It follows the Large Hadron Collider and the two giant detector collaborations, ATLAS and CMS, which together ran the biggest experiment ever attempted and produced the discovery that earned Peter Higgs and François Englert the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for the theories that predicted the particle.

The book explains what the Higgs boson actually is, what role it plays, and how physicists managed to find it. It also considers how the find has altered our picture of the fundamental laws of nature. Along the way, the author recounts the human side of the work: the teamwork across many institutions, the technical ingenuity the project demanded, and what daily life was like for those involved, including time spent in an underground facility in Switzerland.

The story includes setbacks as well as triumphs. It covers a serious failure in the collider's most expensive machinery and a short-lived claim that neutrinos had travelled faster than light. Readers who finish it should come away with a practical grasp of modern particle physics and a sense of where current research is heading.