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Elusive
How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around June 14, 2022. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
Description
*A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Selection*
The first major biography of Peter Higgs, revealing how a short burst of work changed modern physics
On July 4, 2012, the announcement came that one of the longest-running mysteries in physics had been solved: the Higgs boson, the missing piece in understanding why particles have mass, had finally been discovered. On the rostrum, surrounded by jostling physicists and media, was the particle’s retiring namesake—the only person in history to have an existing single particle named for them. Why Peter Higgs? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and others, Close illuminates how an unprolific man became one of the world’s most famous scientists. Close finds that scientific competition between people, institutions, and states played as much of a role in making Higgs famous as Higgs’s work did.
A revelatory study of both a scientist and his era, Elusive will remake our understanding of modern physics.
Praise
"In Elusive, Mr. Higgs’s friend and colleague Frank Close offers a sympathetic biography of the “shy, modest” man and famous particle."
—Wall Street Journal—Jimmy Soni, bestselling author of The Founders
—Caleb Scharf, author of The Ascent of Information