Summary: This is a pretty good book, but I'm still trying to work out just what audience it is best suited for.
How about a bright high school freshman, one who hasn't taken physics or even advanced algebra yet? Or perhaps someone a bit older who never took much mathematics. This book really does not require much (if any) math.
That might be good. Such a person might want to know about elementary particles. They're fascinating. And they are the building blocks of matter.
The book starts with an explanation of what particles are, a little history of particle physics, and (here's what a high school student might want to know) some description of what it is like to become a particle physicist: you go to college, you go to graduate school, you become a post-doc, you stay at a university, where you work on experiments or do theory, or maybe you just give up and get a job on Wall Street.
Then there is a description of the standard model, with the quantum numbers for the particles we know about. The Higgs boson is added to the list, even though it has not been discovered. And there is a discussion of high energy experiments, and plenty about that Higgs boson.
And there's material about supersymmetry and a little about cosmology.
There are a couple of appendices. One has a few pages on Feynman diagrams. Okay, that may confuse some readers but it is just an appendix. I'd leave it in. Another mentions internal symmetries. Here, I think some diagrams showing a few SU(3) multiplets wouldn't have hurt, but I guess Kane figured that telling about the families of leptons and quarks was enough.
In short, it is a good choice for the audience I mentioned. I just wish it had a little more in it. What's there gives a reader a good idea about why some folks find so much beauty and fascination in this field. |
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