Elusive

An illuminating history of the man and the science behind the Higgs boson, a piece of scientific history (Spectator).

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 of 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 this boson. 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.

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. 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.