#frank close

[funeral]

Frank Close, Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry

[fictional-llamas]

"So we are all stardust or, if you are less romantic, nuclear waste..."

-Antimatter, Frank Close 🌌

[justforbooks]

In the summer of 1964, a reclusive young professor at the University of Edinburgh wrote two scientific papers which have come to change our understanding of the most fundamental building blocks of matter and the nature of the universe. Peter Higgs posited the existence an almost infinitely tiny particle - today known as the Higgs boson - which is the key to understanding why particles have mass, and but for which atoms and molecules could not exist.

For nearly 50 years afterwards, some of the largest projects in experimental physics sought to demonstrate the physical existence of the boson which Higgs had proposed. Sensationally, confirmation came in July 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. The following year Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. One of the least-known giants of science, he is the only person in history to have had a single particle named for them.

This revelatory book is 'not so much a biography of the man but of the boson named after him'. It brilliantly traces the course of much of twentieth-century physics from the inception of quantum field theory to the completion of the 'standard model' of particles and forces, and the pivotal role of Higgs's idea in this evolution. It also investigates the contested history of Higgs's responsibility for the breakthrough when there were others close by, and explains why the boson is named for him alone. Competition between institutions and states, Close shows, then played as much of a role in creating Higgs's fame as his work itself. Drawing on conversations with Higgs over a decade (a figure generally as elusive as his particle) this is a superb study of a scientist and his era - and of how scientific knowledge advances.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[nosferdoc]

[bookxquote]

“The same atoms that existed back then are what we are made of today. Once inert, complex combinations of these atoms have become organized to create what we call consciousness and are able to receive, from far across the universe, light that had set out in those earlier lifeless times. We in our ‘now’ can bear witness to that earlier lifeless epoch, which after the event gives it some sort of a reality. We have not been created out of nothing, but from a primeval ‘ur-matter’. atoms formed billions of years ago that have for a brief while been gathered into collections that think they are us.”

“What if there were no life, no Earth, no planets, Sun, or stars, no atoms with the potential to be reorganized into future somethings; what if there were just emptiness?”

- Nothing, Frank Close.

[oupacademic]

I am writing this post from Teton Village in Wyoming. Ten days ago, my family and I arrived from England, to be here to witness the total eclipse of the sun, at 11:36 am local time precisely, on 21st August.

We know exactly where it will be and when it will be, to the second, but as for the weather – we won’t know until the day itself. Ironic what we can, and can’t, predict with certainty. So in the next 48 hours I shall be checking the local weather forecasts to see what the odds are of a clear sky, and whether we need to relocate. Even then, unless the sky is blue there will still always the risk of a rogue cloud obscuring the moon and sun at the magic moment.

On the day itself, as we are located on the path of totality I hope we will be staying in our garden or at least not travelling far, as the roads will be jammed with people on the move. I shall set up a tripod for my camera and brief the children about what will happen, how to look at the sun through darkened glass and, what to look out for during totality.

I was eight years old when my schoolteacher showed me a partial eclipse. He said that if someday I saw a total eclipse I would remember it forever – but I would have to wait 45 years before one came to England; that would be a narrow path across Cornwall on 11 August 1999.

Half a lifetime later I went there, with my wife and elder daughter. The sky was covered with cloud and it rained, but the sensation was as profound as anything I have experienced. Since then I have seen five eclipses under clear skies and this time, in America, I have brought along my children and two grandchildren. Max is the same age I was when I first saw an eclipse, and I hope he and his brother Jack will be as excited by this as I was back then.

Guest post by Frank Close, an eminent research theoretical physicist in nuclear and particle physics.

GIF via Giphy.

[funeral]

Frank Close, Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry

[funeral]

Frank Close, Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry