8.2 /10 1 Votes8.2
Language English Originally published 1993 | 4.1/5 Goodreads Publication date 1993 Country United States of America | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ISBN 0-385-31211-3 (Original hardcover) Similar Leon M Lederman books, Physics books, Modern physics books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? is a 1993 popular science book by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi.
Contents
The book provides a brief history of particle physics, starting with the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Democritus, and continuing through Isaac Newton, Roger J. Boscovich, Michael Faraday, and Ernest Rutherford and quantum physics in the 20th century.
Lederman explains in the book why he gave the Higgs boson the nickname "The God Particle":
This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one...
Historical context
Fermilab director and subsequent Nobel physics prize winner Leon M. Lederman was a very prominent early supporter – some sources say the architect or proposer – of the Superconducting Super Collider project, which was endorsed around 1983, and was a major proponent and advocate throughout its lifetime. Lederman wrote his 1993 popular science book – which sought to promote awareness of the significance of such a project – in the context of the project's last years and the changing political climate of the 1990s. The increasingly moribund project was finally shelved that same year after some $2 billion of expenditure. The proximate causes of the closure were the rising US budget deficit, rising projected costs of the project, and the cessation of the Cold War which reduced the perceived political pressure within the United States to undertake and complete high profile megaprojects of this kind.