Reviewed by Mike Perricone How deep down does Bruce Schumm want to take us? "Deep down within the atomic nucleus," he writes, "deeply within the paradoxical richness of empty space, deep inside the synapses of the great scientific thinkers of the twentieth century." An experimental particle physicist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Schumm is a collaborator on the BaBar experiment, and previously the SLD experiment, both at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and is also working on International Linear Collider detector studies. Schumm writes: "Einstein held that any physical theory worthy of respect must be explicable to any clear-thinking person." Schumm states that he intends the book for the "deeply interested public." Is his approach on target? Moving from particles to waves, on to the importance of phase, then to the irrelevance of phase in quantum mechanics, he writes, "It's not that the phase of quantum mechanical systems becomes irrelevant, but that the irrelevance of phase is understood to be, in and of itself, tremendously relevant. The rigorous formulation of this notion, known as gauge theory, is a theory of the relevance of irrelevance; within this oxymoronic inspiration lies one of the most profound intellectual leaps in the storied history of particle physics." Perhaps the best matches are well-read physics amateurs, or readers with a scientific background, not necessarily in physics. Still, after following the complex trail of the mass-giving Higgs boson—from the concept of screening in solid state physics, through the noted 1964 paper by Peter Higgs linking screening to relativistic quantum field theory, and on to what he terms "the developing notion" of hidden gauge symmetry—Schumm knows how to get himself back in phase: crack a cold one ("Not a ‘Lite' one, mind you, but a robust draft fit for the occasion") and raise a toast to Peter Higgs. |
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