BOOK OF AUGUST

                                             
Title          : The Edge of Physics
Author      : Anil Ananthaswamy
Pages      : 322
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN        : 0618884688

As we can guess from the subtitle of the book, A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe, this is a book of  extreme "Physics Tourism",yes,it's a book about visiting the remote and inhospitable places where a lot of groundbreaking physics and astrophysics experiments are conducted. Ananthaswamy, the author and consulting-editor of  the New Scientist magazine, tells the story of our quest to understand the universe, as seen through the eyes of a traveller.

Each chapter is a visit to  a new place, and looking at a different problem in Physics. Stories about the history of the experiments and locations are mixed together with short and readable explanations of the physics problems being studied, and why the experiments demand to be done in the odd places where they're located. The author takes readers behind the scenes of these experiments in some of the most inhospitable places in the world, leading the tour with wit and an eye for compelling detail.

The book begins with a pilgrimage to the Mount Wilson Observatory, where Edwin Hubble made the astounding discovery that not only is there a universe beyond the Milky Way but that the universe is expanding. We go inside the venerable dome of the 100-inch telescope that made Hubble's work possible. The next chapter is a story of how dark matter was discovered, how physicists converged on the mostly likely explanation and of the painstaking search for what makes up the universe's unseen mass.

We then journey to one of the harshest places in the world: Siberia in winter. Deep beneath the frozen surface of the massive Lake Baikal is the world's first underwater neutrino telescope. Designed to detect the slipperiest of subatomic particles, the Lake Baikal Neutrino Telescope could point us to dense regions of dark matter in our galaxy. Next is a trip to the Atacama Desert high in the Chilean Andes which is the site of  the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

There is a chapter dedication to the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its detectors, like ATLAS. What does it take to build a machine like the LHC? Will it find the Higgs boson, the particle thought to give other elementary particles their mass? Will it create particles of dark matter, and solve the mystery of the universe's missing mass? Will it find signs of supersymmetry, and give physicists a clue to physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. A lot of questions are that subsequently being answered.


The author's travels ends in the Hanle Valley in Ladakh, India. The valley floor is at an altitude of 14,000 feet. It was a fitting end, given that the observatory being established there by Indian astronomers represents the next generation of observatories: higher, colder, and so remote that telescopes in such locations will have to be robotic. The epilogue also looks ahead to experiments of the future. The historical and other anecdotes are well done in the travelogue style which is an exotic experience.

Chapters: One: Monks and Astronomers. Two: The Experiment That Detects Nothing. Three: Little Neutral Ones. Four: The Paranal Light Quartest. Five: Fire, Rock, and Ice. Six: Three Thousand Eyes in the Karoo. Seven: Antimatter Over Antarctica. Eight: Einstein Meets Quantum Physics at the South Pole. Nine: The Heart of the Matter. Ten: Whispers from Other Universes. Website: www.edgeofphysics.com.
Email of author: anil@nasw.org.


(Book review text courtesy: website of the book)