Facts And Mysteries In Elementary Particle Physics (Revised Edition) Revised Edition

This book gives a complete table of charges, spins, and masses for all elementary particles for which these quantities are known. This list includes the top quark (spin 1/2 and very heavy), the Higgs particle (spin 0 and very heavy), and gluons (spin 1 and no mass). The book gives entertaining biographies and avoids mathematics, except for the Einstein-Planck relation between frequency and energy and the Einstein relation between momentum and energy.The masses of the neutrinos are not known. These are small but nonzero. Weinberg's second cosmology book gives some data on the squares of the neutrino masses.The nature of dark matter is also not known. Weinberg's book gives some experimental insight on this matter.The Facts and Mysteries book declares supersymmetry and string theory to be irrelevant. This is probably correct since there is absolutely no experimental support for these theories.I enjoyed the book. It is very entertaining. It also provides very up-to-date data.I would have preferred more discussion on the nature of dark matter (could there be a piece of dark matter inside each proton?), on quark charges (must they be fractional?), and on gravity (external star solutions, known as the Schwarzschild solutions, are well tested experimentally, but interior solutions (stellar and planetary densities) are less well tested, allowing for gravity theories with curvature-quadratic terms added to an otherwise curvature linear Lagrangian density.

This book provides an excellent overview of particle physics and the standard model. It is geared more toward undergraduate or graduate students in physics or related science and engineering fields, than to the public at large. Some sections are not easy to read and, in many instances, I needed the help of Wikipedia articles to clarify my understanding. Still, as an all encompassing of a description of the field, it is an excellent source, written by one of the people at the center of it all.

Although this is a revised edition printed in 2018, it is still looking forward to the operation of the LHC and the Higgs boson has yet to be discovered.

This, and Susskind's Theoretical Minimum books, are where to start to learn physics. I found it especially good for refreshing what I used to know, or only sorta knew. It's good to read the information with out sales pitches for an author's current research agenda or pop science woo. There's lots of other books where you can find trendy speculation that floats in the clouds but if you want just the facts this is for you. It won't substitute for a graduate education but it might motivate you to pursue such.

Has shades of particle physics arrogance and old-school sexism, but with a little trivial rewording this is a hidden jewel on the story of particle physics and even where it might head next (higgs & cosmological constant puzzle, p. 311).

This book is an excellent primer on the history and key milestones in particle physics. The short bios bring these, mostly men, to life. It will encourage you to dig deeper into particle physics.

Starts out strong, but loses the non-expert reader somewhere towards the middle.

good