Playful Explorations

Posted on 11/10/2018 by Jon Butterworth

Another review of Atom Land , and two other books.

nearctic traveller's avatarNearcticTraveller

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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Boosting boost

Posted on 09/10/2018 by Jon Butterworth

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).

Grosse Point Blank "Ten Years"

I didn’t join the army.

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Book Review — Atom Land: A Guided Tour Through the Strange (and Impossibly Small) World of Particle Physics

Posted on 06/10/2018 by Jon Butterworth

Just found this review of Atom Land (Most Wanted Particle in the UK) which I thought was worth sharing. See, it’s easy 😎 )

Evilcyclist's Bookshelf's avatarEvilcyclist's Bookshelf

Atom Land: A Guided Tour Through the Strange (and Impossibly Small) World of Particle Physics by Jon Butterworth. Butterworth is a lecture in particle physics at a layman’s level. Butterworth is a physics professor at University College London and a member of the Atlas experiment at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider. He studied Physics at the University of Oxford, gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in particle physics in 1992. His Ph.D. research used the ZEUS particle detector to investigate R-parity violating supersymmetry at the Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA) at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg.

Quantum physics, particle physics, and hard science for laymen have been around for some time. In the early 1980s, I read Taking the Quantum Leap by Fred Allan Wolf. I also read Feynman’s autobiographical works on his career and work. Today the there are hundreds of documentaries…

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Why use a map to tell the story?

Posted on 04/10/2018 by Jon Butterworth

The paperback edition of A Map of the Invisible is out now, and to help promote it we made a few videos on some of the themes in the book. Here’s the second one:

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