Product Description
In Particles: A Very Short Introduction, best-selling author Frank Close provides a compelling and lively introduction to the fundamental particles that make up the universe. The book begins with a guide to what matter is made up of and how it evolved, and goes on to describe the fascinating and cutting-edge techniques used to study it. The author discusses particles such as quarks, electrons, and the neutrino, and exotic matter and antimatter. He also investigates the forces of nature, accelerators and detectors, and the intriguing future of particle physics. This book is essential reading for general readers interested in popular science, students of physics, and scientists at all levels.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 9 reviews)

Nice Little Book by Shatzi Crabtree (NC)

4 Stars
October 27, 2009
It helps to have a little knowledge of chemistry and physics but overall a very good introduction!

Good intro by WT

5 Stars
September 20, 2009
I agree with many other readers in that you could do worse in finding a book on Particle Physics. The book is not overly academic. Sometimes it can get a little detailed and requires some extra attention, but I feel the reader could forget these parts and still have a good basic idea of what particle physics is about. Someone who reads this will feel a little more in the know when they read news articles about the subject, or at the very least it may whet their appetite to learn more about the topic. A great read which I highly recommend.

Particle Physics for the rest of us by Bojan Tunguz (Greencastle, IN USA)

5 Stars
June 06, 2009
One of the most intriguing and fascinating scientific stories of the 20th century has been the incredible advance in our understanding of matter in its most fundamental form. In a nutshell, the 20th century has seen the vindication of the atomic hypothesis: all of the nature, the matter and even the interactions of matter, can be reduced to a finite number of indivisible particles. It turns out that atoms, the original candidates for irreducible particles as their name suggests, are in fact composed of a myriad other particles which to the best of our knowledge and understanding are truly fundamental. Furthermore, we have discovered many other particles that cannot be found in an atom, and many of those turned out to be composites of other fundamental particles. Considering how many different kinds of these extra-atomic particles were discovered, it is quite remarkable that we were able to reduce this "zoo" to just a few basic ones. This book presents an interesting and accessible account of how we managed to get to this point. The book presents both the experimental and theoretical developments in Particle Physics that has led us to the point where we are at. The book is intelligible to anyone who has any interest in the subject, and it doesn't require any special mathematical knowledge. And yet, like most books in this series, it does not condescend to the reader but tries to educate him and bring him up to the latest in our understanding of this fascinating field. All of that makes this book an enjoyable and worthwhile read.

Good Read! by kclam (Hong Kong, China)

4 Stars
February 11, 2009
This book provides a lively review of particle physics with illustrations. The introductory notes of each chapter are useful. Many interesting topics are covered, such as: the elementary particles of matter (electron and quark); strange particles, anti-matter and dark matter in cosmology; and the forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetic force, strong and weak force). By the way, it is fascinating to know that we exist because of a series of fortunate accidents: the Sun burns at just the right rate; the stable protons (seeds of hydrogen) enables stars to cook the chemical elements essential for the Earth to be built; neutrons are slightly heavier than protons, which enables beta radioactivity and transmutation of the elements for the Sun to shine.

Superb short treatment by A Reader (North Bethesda, MD USA)

5 Stars
August 30, 2008
We owe a debt of gratitude to Frank Close for writing such a short and comprehensible introduction to a field that, in everyday scientific practice, is as technical and complex as they come. It is a major accomplishment to set out, in under 150 pages, not just the history of particle physics, the scales of time and space being investigated, the development of experimental techniques from Rutherford to the Large Hadron Collider, and the key concepts of the standard model that has dominated particle physics for more than 30 years. Indeed, the neat overview and classification of elementary particles and their interactions in the standard model is sufficient reason to keep this book close at hand. As befits a very short introduction, the book devotes only limited space to more speculative ideas such as supersymmetry, and indeed strings are mentioned only once. Even so, a few authoritative pages dealing with unsolved theoretical and conceptual problems as they relate to particle physics would have been helpful. Close is associated with CERN and an enthusiastic advocate of multi-billion dollar particle accelerators. While these machines are indeed impressive, an outside observer cannot help but wonder whether such a regimented and bureaucratic approach to science has not already reached severely diminishing marginal returns. It will be interesting to look back in a few years' time at whether this heavy investment of taxpayer money has paid the dividends in new knowledge and insight that Close and others like him hope for.

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