The Infinity Puzzle: How the Quest to Understand Quantum Field Theory Led to Extraordinary Science, High Politics, and the World's Most Expensive Experiment

Synopsis

We are living in a Golden Age of Physics. Forty or so years ago, three brilliant, yet little-known scientists - an American, a Dutchman, and an Englishman - made breakthroughs which later inspired the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva: a 27 kilometer-long machine which has already costs ten billion dollars, taken twenty years to build, and now promises to reveal how the universe itself came to be. The Infinity Puzzle is the inside story of those forty years of research, breakthrough, and endeavour. Peter Higgs, Gerard 't Hooft and James Bjorken, were the three scientists whose work is explored here, played out across the decades against a backdrop of high politics, low behaviour, and billion dollar budgets. Written from within by Frank Close, the eminent physicist and award-winning writer, The Infinity Puzzle also draws upons the author's close friendships with those involved.