Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics

Rating:
Summary: Great insight, really bad writing
Review: I don't believe I have ever been so internally conflicted by any book. On the one hand, it is clear that Martinus Veltman is a legitimate genius. The book is a cornucopia of insights I have never seen in any other work. Veltman also enriches the book with original accounts of the human side of numerous physicists; some are so detailed as to seem gossipy.

On the other hand, whoever copy-edited this book should be banned from the English-speaking world. Much of the book reads like a transcript of an informal discussion group. It is the task of the editor to provide the translation of the casual musings of a genius into a polished publication; that task is unfulfilled here.

Edited properly, Facts and Mysteries could be a must-have book for all layman physics enthusiasts. As it is, it's just an also-ran. I would recommend it only to those who are already pretty conversant in the field.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and concise, but awkward prose
Review: Veltman delivers the tale of phenomenological particle physics with enthusiasm and depth as one of its leading researchers. He attempts to cover the whole arena, from the complex behavior of quarks and gluons to the description of particle detectors. Woven throughout the book are small "vignettes" (his terminology for brief biographical sketches) of the many physicists, famous and not-so-famous, who contributed to the current understanding of our universe. He succeeds relatively well in his goal of explaining particle physics to the layman.

But don't look here for any coverage of the more esoteric and exotic ideas of theoretical physics like string theory. He unequivocally states,

"The fact is that this book is about physics, and this implies that the theoretical ideas discussed must be supported by experimental facts. Neither supersymmetry nor string theory satisfy this criterion. They are figments of the theoretical mind. To quote Pauli: They are not even wrong. They have no place here."

He is, of course, correct but I think he downplays the mathematically unifying power of string theory, for which experimental verification lies beyond today's technological reach and thus cannot be vindicated one way or the other. Mathematical beauty, while not a sure sign of physical truth, can at least serve as a powerful beacon for future physical insights.

Always the true scientist, Veltman should be praised for unapologetically declaring agnosticism if evidence for a theoretical idea isn't clear cut. For example, he writes several times that the neutrino is massless but will almost always parenthetically acknowledge that it might have a very small mass (which indeed it does, as experimental evidence of neutrino mixing has been since verified). He deems it worthy enough to have an entire section devoted to neutrino mixing and its implications.

I found one glaring problem with the book that prevented the 5 star rating it could have received: writing style. It just doesn't read all that smoothly, and I think it could have been cleaned up a bit more by a more astute editor.

Balancing the rocky prose, however, are wonderful color templates (excellently used during his description of anti-matter) to aid explanations, pictures of apparati and scientists to portray the human side of science, and clear diagrams of particle interactions.

If you want to learn what physicists empirically know about particle physics today and how they determine it, get this book; just don't expect smooth reading. Veltman is clearly passionate about his profession and it shows.