The Particle Odyssey

A Journey to the Heart of Matter

by Frank Close, Michael Marten, Christine Sutton

This is a history of experimental particle physics starting around 1900, highlighting the major experimental breakthroughs and discoveries. The book includes more than 300 illustrations, showing the scientists, experimental setups, and particle interactions.

This book tells the story of the discovery of electrons, protons, neutrons, cosmic rays, antimatter, neutrinos, quarks, and dozens of other particles. The tools behind these discoveries are explained, including: cloud chambers, bubble chambers, spark chambers, cyclotrons, synchrotrons, super synchrotrons, and colliders. Mostly the story is about the people behind the ideas, experiments, and discoveries. The accelerators and detectors which are currently being constructed are also discussed. The Large Hadron Collider, and ATLAS detector should start redefining physics and making headlines by 2007.

The book is readable by anyone with an interest in science & technology, but should also be useful for people in the field who need to know the history.

The nature of the Internet has been greatly influenced by the work of particle physicist, as well as being a catalyst for international collaboration on an immense scale. Its a positive feedback system with particle physicist constantly pushing the capability of the Internet which then changes the way they go about doing their work. The last couple of pages in this book has the story of how Tim Berners-Lee while working on particle physics data acquisition and document distribution software wrote the first web browser.

Read this book to learn what particle physics is about and how billions of your tax dollars are being put to good use, building the foundation for tomorrow's technology.

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