The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

A tremendously entertaining book covering much of the history of physics by one of the best known particle physicists. Lederman's book is interspersed with some of the most humorous stories I've ever read in a science book and I can't resist sharing two of them here. In an imaginary conversation with the greek philosopher Democritus, Lederman is talking about how elusive the Higgs particle is, and comments that the book's title refers to this particle, but that his publisher wouldn't allow the book to be called "The God-damned Particle. The second is from a discussion of building a piece of laboratory equipment to use in a particle accelerator. They acquired a 12 inch naval cannon to use as a collimator, and needed to fill it with beryllium as a filter, but the inside of the bore had deep rifling grooves. He sent a skinny graduate student inside the tube to stuff steel wool into the grooves. After a few hours of work, the graduate student crawled out all hot, sweaty and irritated and said "I quit," to which Lederman is said to have replied, "You can't quit, where will I find another student of your caliber?"

This book proves something that I have long suspected about physicists; a lot of them are children at heart, and they approach the physical world with the same sense of awe and glee that a child does by instinct.
Lederman has a lot of fun here, writing a chronological account of particle physics in a narrative style yet the book contains enough non-physics humor to captivate someone totally disinterested in the world of physics. I particularly enjoyed his little elbow-jabs at those lazy physics theoreticians, since he himself is a technician of physics.
I unreservedly recommend this book to anyone. I don't think you will be disappointed.

This is undoubtedly one of the best popular science
books ever written!
Comparable in content and richness of presentation
with the 'Cosmos' by Carl Sagan, this book takes us
into a fascinating journey in pursuit of the a-tom!
The *truely* indivisible building block!
The fact that Leon is an authority makes this book a
godsend for the layman who has no clue of what's going
on in the wonderful sub-atomic world!
This is a very lucid account of the history of the search for the atom taking us one step at a time right from the very beginning of the atomic notion.
The highlight of the book is the manner in which Leon describes clearly and slowly, "How,Why and What led each individual to ask the various questions and their efforts to arrive at plausible answers", and how this endless sequence of such individuals, their questions and their theories built the tower of science one brick at a time.
A must read on *any* list.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Lederman said, among other things, that he would have called it the "God-damned particle," but his publisher nixed the idea, for understandable reasons.

He has a sense of humor, and he writes in a very easy-to-understand style; yet he is one of the top--maybe THE top--experimental physicists on the planet. I'd really like to hear him debate Tom Van Flandern, author of DARK MATTER, MISSING PLANETS AND NEW COMETS, but--I probably wouldn't understand over one out of ten words. They both write well, and have greatly interesting things to say if you are interested in cosmology.

For the price, how can you go wrong? Give it a try.

Joseph Pierre,
author of THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

This is billed as the "funniest book about physics ever written." But that's not saying much, the humor is mostly one-liners tossed in here and there, which starts to get old after about 400 pages.

It has a pretty good, comprehensive history of physics. It was interesting to learn that "theorists" and "experimenters" are two discrete groups within the field of physics. It was also interesting to read about the stories of who/how the discoveries were made, although it seems as though they were often having inspiration on Friday afternoons and having to work day and night all through the weekend - did they never have inspirations on Monday?

Some of the math gets a bit dense, even though Lederman promised that it wouldn't be. But overall, this was an interesting book, even if I had to glaze over some of the dense math.

Lederman spends the first third of this book reviewing physics, from Greek times to the early part of this century; the second third focuses on the more recent history of particle accelerators - in which Lederman himself plays a part. All this is a necessary and fascinating preface to the final third - an exploration of the frontiers of knowledge in the exploration of the fundamental building blocks of nature, in which Lederman quietly pokes fun at physicists' attempts to find the answer to life, the universe, and everything - which they suspect might be very simple and beautiful, and at least partly to do with the God Particle - the Higgs Boson - a (so far) theoretical particle/force (I am not a physicist, so I can get away with this description) which gives mass to everything in the universe.
If reading this does not get you excited about physics, nothing will. I look forward to an update, Mr. Lederman - have you found Higgs yet?

This is probably the best "starter" book for anyone interested in particle/high energy physics. BTW it was Lederman (author) who gave the Higgs boson (verified 4 July 2012) the title of the book as its name (it was actually a joke, but you'll really need to read the book to get it). This is an easy to read book and full of the humor that made Leon Lederman famous (that, and a Nobel Prize).

The first book published post-Higgs "discovery" is "The Particle at the End of the Universe," the title paying homage to Douglas Adams, author of "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".