The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe

The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe

3.9 of 5 stars 3.90  ·  rating details  ·  73 ratings  ·  23 reviews
Speculation is rife that by 2012 the elusive Higgs boson will be found at the Large Hadron Collider. If found, the Higgs boson would help explain why everything has mass. But there’s more at stake—what we’re really testing is our capacity to make the universe reasonable. Our best understanding of physics is predicated on something known as quantum field theory. Unfortunate...more
Hardcover, 448 pages
Published November 29th 2011 by Basic Books (first published October 27th 2011)
more details... edit details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 354)
filter  |  sort: default (?)  |  rating details
John
A fascinating history of how physicists achieved a unified understanding of most of the forces of nature in the last half-century or so. The book attempts to convey some of this understanding to non-specialists but also explains why it did not come easily. The question of renormalization, ie, proving that the theories would lead to finite and meaningful results, motivates the title of the book. The author also devotes a lot of space to the human story and the thorny questions of who had priority...more
Long Nguyen
If you are fascinated at all with recent (and by recent, I mean the latter half of the 20th century) development in physics, and the major players involved, then this book is for you. I am of the personal belief that even though science at its best is about the world, what makes science human is the people behind it. And they, like you or I, have feelings, aspirations, and interests. They also make mistakes, sometimes benign, sometimes tragic.

Despite my general knowledge, this book still has pla...more
Matt Heavner
This book was about 25% interesting physics with a few very good explanations I hadn't heard before. I like the liquid water / snowflake symmetry breaking example quite a bit. That's the upside to this book.

The downside was that 75% of the book was a "cult of personality" / history minutia / repetitive discussions about the Nobel prize. Yes, the Nobel prize is a big deal. But I'd be interested to do a word count on this book: I bet the common words (the, a, an, and) do their usual distribution,...more
Natasha
A very detailed, very thorough review of the history of the search for renormalization of field theory, but a tad light on the science.

I enjoy quantum mechanics and quantum physics and was looking forward to this book due to the subject matter. History always has to be told when talking about developments in science since those developments do not come about in a vacuum. But there is always plenty of science too. This book focused on time lines, who discovered what, and how those discoveries cam...more
Bojan Tunguz
Since its completion in 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been the focus of a lot of news coverage. It is by far the largest scientific project in history, and very likely the last such project for the foreseeable future. And yet, it has been fairly difficult to explain to the general public the exact purpose of LHC and what sorts of questions are the scientists trying to answer by culling over its experimental results. One of the things that LHC is trying to find is the putative...more
Chris Lewis
What I didn't realize going into The Infinity Puzzle was that the author's purpose in writing it was not so much to educate a lay audience about quantum mechanics; rather, it was to clear up various fuzzy bits in the history of quantum discoveries through the 20th century. So while I was happy to learn a lot of details about the Standard Model and its construction, I wasn't so interested in the details of who published what paper when, and what conversations they had about who discovered things...more
Behzad Mirhashem
The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe was published in late 2011, just as experimental physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were homing in on the long-sought Higgs particle. In this book, British particle physicist Frank Close successfully meets two very difficult challenges.

First, Close provides a non-mathematical but honest account of the most important developments in theoretical elementary particle physics over the last several decades. It is...more
Sean
If your goal is to get an overview of modern physics from a historical perspective The Infinity Puzzle would nicely serve as one of two books to describe the second half of the 20th century (you would need another to cover gravitation and cosmology, perhaps A Brief History of Time). Frank Close, an English particle physicist, begins describing the infinity puzzle by taking up some of the logical holes left in quantum mechanics following its founding in the early 1900's. The reader is then lead t...more
Randy
Professor Close is a wonderful writer... he does a fine job of inserting and explaining some of the theoretical aspects of the science, without overwhelming us poor laymen.

This is a chronology of the theories of matter and the forces acting on matter.... to enjoy it you should have a basic notion what a quark is even if you cannot name the various types of quarks or explain how they do what they do, or how they do it.

He compares the role of the Higgs boson in giving matter its mass to the role o...more
Brian Clegg
This is a really important popular science book if you are interested in physics, because it covers some of the important bits of modern physics that most of us science writers are too afraid to write about. Starting with renormalization in QED, the technique used to get rid of the unwanted infinities that plagued the early versions of the theory and moving on to the weak force, the massive W and Z bosons, the Higgs business and the development of the concept of quarks and some aspects of the th...more
Navneeth
A wonderfully readable account of the events, the science, which eventually led to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider and the search for The Boson. More than being a typical pop-science book, The Infinity Puzzle offers a look into how the theory of electro-weak interactions came about and the people involved (and those whom you thought weren't involved). At times it almost reads like an homage to those deserving individuals who missed winning the Nobel Prize for various reasons. Frank...more
Jeffrey
This is a pretty good book about the history of particle physics late 1940s to about 2010. It's a pretty interesting read and does help one get a better understand that science isn't always a smooth progression from start to finish. It also gives you a feel for the types of rivalries, political pressures, and personalities can get entwined with the endeavours of understanding the universe.

Necessarily to understand the progression of physics, the author regularly goes into some detail trying to p...more
Stephen Davis
Provides an overview of the development of particle physics and the gradual understanding of the strong and week forces along with the new concepts to help make the math work out. It approaches the journey from the various scientists involved, and how they made steps forwards and steps backwards along the way.
David
Not done with this yet... but it's an exciting book in that it combines the stories of the people involved in the discoveries and theoretical speculations, along with the timelines and explanations of the science as the book moves along, written for the general reader rather than the specialist.
Mark
Spends A LOT of time focused on who and when theories were proposed (with emphasis on who should get the credit) and not so much on the content of the theories. While no doubt this is of great interest to many who have connections to the scientists, it didn't do much for me as a total outsider.
Greg Stoll
Interesting account of how we discovered Quantum Field Theory. I didn't quite understand all of it and I gotta be honest - particle physics is pretty crazy. I miss the proton + neutron + electron model, but progress marches on...
Gendou
This is a detailed history of the discoveries of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), and their unification into the Standard Model by spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism. It's one of those people-driven histories of science, which can get boring if not petty at times. But overall, it tells an exciting story of this impressive achievement.

The central theme of the book is renormalization in Gauge Theory. The first half of the book introduces the reader to...more
sid
A bit tough to follow this on audio, especially in the car without the visual diagrams. Aimed at the non-physicist, but a lot of it was difficult to grasp and fairly dry.
Tantivy
Tedious. Too tied up in what could've been.
Cassandra Silva
This was definitely not what I thought it was going to be. It was more of a history of the various forerunners into the ideas that go behind much of theoretical physics and quantum field theory but contained very little science in it. Frankly I could care less who got noble prizes for what and who got shafted, I am more interested in the theories and current understanding itself which this book only slightly got into.
BAKU
This is good ( where else will you find " Recall that structure occurs because fermions are like cuckoos, whereas bosons are like penguins. " ) But I couldn't real all of it as I had to give it back , and the library here is screwed now ~
Paul Guzman
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was written well, and the author made everything easy to understand for those of us who aren't physicists. The history of the entire process is really fascinating, and I would recommend this to anyone who may be interested in physics.
Lisa O'Reilly
So far (on Chapter 5), I'm reading every chapter twice: the first time checking each endnote, the second reading straight through. Enjoying it both times.
Vicky
Jun 08, 2013 Vicky marked it as to-read
Daryl
Jun 05, 2013 Daryl marked it as to-read  ·  review of another edition
RenéB
May 29, 2013 RenéB marked it as wishlist
Andrey
May 27, 2013 Andrey marked it as to-read
« previous 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 next »
topics  posts  views  last activity   
Updated Universe Comprehension... 1 4 17 de Feb 02:11  
The Infinity Puzzle: [How the Quest to Understand Quantum Field Theory Led to Extraordinary Science, High Politics, and the World's Most Expensive Experiment] (Hardcover)
The Infinity Puzzle: How the Hunt to Understand the Universe Led to Extraordinary Science, High Politics, and the Large Hadron Collider (ebook)
L'enigma dell'infinito (Paperback)
The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe (Audio CD)
The Infinity Puzzle: How the Hunt to Understand the Universe Led to Extraordinary Science, High Politics, and the Large Hadron Collider (Hardcover)

Antimatter Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) Nothing Neutrino The Void

Share This Book

Your website