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Present At The Creation: The Story Of CERN And The Large Hadron Collider (2010)

by Amir D. Aczel(Favorite Author)

3.65 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0307591670 (ISBN13: 9780307591678)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Crown

review 1: This book was a bit odd in a way: very uneven in quality. Some were excellent descriptions of the science involved and why the LHC is so important. Other parts were simply gossip such as recounting how a physicist had an arranged marriage back in Africa or maybe India, I forget which, and then had a concurrent marriage in England and how both wives came to the Nobel ceremony and the etiquette people were going nuts trying to figure out how to seat the trio. Who cares, really? Sure, it made a break from the extremely difficult science but really wasn't anything all that interesting or related to the topic of the book. Some parts of the explanations I understood pretty well, other parts just didn't make sense to me. While normally, I blame my inability to understand the scie... morence on me, this time, I think it was both the author and me. His explanations were simply too verbose, too jargon ridden. The author seems quite proud of his acquaintanceship among the top physicists and does a fair amount of name dropping that is going to go over the heads of people who aren't already part of this scene. Some of the name dropping got in the way of explanations and left me trying to figure out why such and such a person was even named in the paragraph I was reading. I was also annoyed by the fact that he felt a need to identify the ethnic backgrounds of everyone. I think that reached a climax when I read that a scientist was a Jewish Norwegian or Swede. The Jewish part is relevant how? He didn't identify all the Catholic or Protestant Swedes. I just found this aggravating and irrelevant to the story being told. I am looking forward to trying the next science book on my physical to-read shelf which is by an author I've already read and felt he did a good job explaining things. In the meantime, I'm going to go figure out whether to read the next book on my shelf, a book I just purchased, or the book I borrowed! This book is basically not recommended because it just didn't do enough to increase my knowledge of the science or scientists involved and doesn't leave me with a sense of satisfaction after spending a fair amount of time reading it.
review 2: I wanted to read this book to find out what all the "God Particle" fuss was about. I probably understood about 10% of this book, but what I did understand was pretty mind-blowing. Here are some facts I learned about the LHC:It's the largest machine ever built- a 16.5 mile "race track" beneath the ground in Geneva, designed to crash protons into each other to replicate the conditions of the universe 1 trillionth of a second after the big bang. These protons crash into each other at 99.9999991% the speed of light (only because it's not possible to travel the speed of light), and each proton travels around the race track 11,000 times per second. The conditions inside this tunnel are -456 degrees Farenheit, which is the coldest place anywhere in the universe. When the protons crash into each other they generate 100,000 times more heat than the center of the sun. It took 20 years to build and was created as a counterreaction to the atomic bomb because they wanted to use nuclear energy research for positive not destructive reasons. As a result of the research that went into designing it, they have made advancements in medical treatment as well as the birth of the WWW which was created by a scientist working at the facility in order to have an easy way of sharing the research data with other scientists throughout the world. In addition to finding the God Particle (the particle that gives mass to energy- allowing matter to materialize) last year, they also hope to possibly create a small black hole, discover what dark energy and dark matter are made of (all the invisible parts of outer space), and possibly discover the existence of other demensions. Pretty freakin cool. less

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