The chances are you have heard quite a bit about the Higgs boson. The goody-two-shoes of particle physics, it may have been hard to find, but when it was discovered it was just as the theory – the Standard Model – said it should be. It has followed all the rules, so far. Neutrinos, on the other hand, are trouble.
A Science Shambles Blog Network podcast special, 
recorded a couple of weeks ago in a basement in Bloomsbury
Maybe all the maths is just a better metaphor than a sock
Another review of Atom Land , and two other books.
Atom Land: A Guided Tour Through the Strange (And Impossibly Small) World of Particle Physics by Jon Butterworth. The Experiment. New York. 2018.
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. Simon & Schuster. New York. 2017.
Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway by Siobhan Roberts. Bloomsbury USA. 2015.
These three books form a progression from the most concrete to the most abstract or, taking a different point of view, from the most serious to the most playful. At the same time all three are in different ways, highly imaginative.
The first is an account of particle physics, framed as a voyage into the unknown waters of the atomic and subatomic scales in the natural world, accompanied by charts at the beginning of each section that map physicists’ increasing knowledge as they probe matter at ever higher…
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Regular readers (hello!) will know that the topics of jet substructure, boosted objects and the annual Boost meeting often feature here, because I work on them and they are interesting and important for physics at the Large Hadron Collider (and any high energy machine which may follow).
I didn’t join the army.
