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Zusatztext “These are exciting times for particle physics. With their customary charm and wit! Lederman and Hill take us on a fascinating tour of where we’ve been and where we’re going and! along the way! give the best description of the Higgs boson I’ve ever seen. A great read .” —James Trefil! Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Physics! George Mason University! coauthor of Dictionary of Cultural Literacy Praise for the books of Lederman and Hill: “A tour de force of physics made simple….” — Times Literary Supplement “Few books about modern physics are as fascinating! far-ranging! and readable as this.” — NSTA Recommends “Thought-provoking.” — Discover Informationen zum Autor By Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill Klappentext Two leading physicists discuss the importance of the Higgs Boson, the future of particle physics, and the mysteries of the universe yet to be unraveled. On July 4, 2012, the long-sought Higgs Boson--aka "the God Particle"--was discovered at the world's largest particle accelerator, the LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland. On March 14, 2013, physicists at CERN confirmed it. This elusive subatomic particle forms a field that permeates the entire universe, creating the masses of the elementary particles that are the basic building blocks of everything in the known world--from viruses to elephants, from atoms to quasars. Starting where Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman's bestseller The God Particle left off, this incisive new book explains what's next. Lederman and Hill discuss key questions that will occupy physicists for years to come:* Why were scientists convinced that something like the "God Particle" had to exist?* What new particles, forces, and laws of physics lie beyond the "God Particle"?* What powerful new accelerators are now needed for the US to recapture a leadership role in science and to reach "beyond the God Particle," such as Fermilab's planned Project-X and the Muon Collider? Using thoughtful, witty, everyday language, the authors show how all of these intriguing questions are leading scientists ever deeper into the fabric of nature. Readers of The God Particle will not want to miss this important sequel.Chapter 2 A Brief History of the Big Questions The most fundamental of questions we are asking today concern the smallest objects, objects that lie far beyond the atom, the quarks, the leptons (“matter”) and gauge bosons (“force carriers”), the Higgs boson, and whatever lies beyond these things. Here we are exploring a strange new world— world of the smallest things. No one has ever been here before, to examine what is happening at the smallest distances that are now probed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is not entirely blind exploration, for we actually have an inkling of what we are trying to understand—ut surprises may be around the next corner. In short: we are attempting to answer the vexing question: What is the origin of mass? Mass is one of the most important defining quantities of matter. But where does it come from? What makes mass happen? Will we ever become skillful enough to calculate the mass of the electron or the muon or the top quark from a “first principle”? What shapes and controls and sculpts the elementary constituents of matter and their masses? This is a bit like trying to answer the deep biological question “What and where is the genetic code of life?” The answer to that question came in the 1950s—it turned out to be encoded into a very long and durable molecule called DNA. And from that has come an entirely new set of capabilities, as DNA can be “read” and “reread” and, eventually, we think, “rewritten.” All structure and function and ultimately all diseases of living organisms are controlled by DNA and its associated proce...
