Book Description

Although particle accelerators are the book's main thrust, it offers a broad synoptic description of beams which applies to a wide range of other devices such as low-energy focusing and transport systems and high-power microwave sources. Develops material from first principles, basic equations and theorems in a systematic way. Assumptions and approximations are clearly indicated. Discusses underlying physics and validity of theoretical relationships, design formulas and scaling laws. Features a significant amount of recent work including image effects and the Boltzmann line charge density profiles in bunched beams. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Ingenious methods
Particle accelerators are well described in this book. One of their biggest objectives is to maximise the beam luminosity, so that when the beam is incident on another beam, or a target, the maximal number of reactions can happen. But the problem is that if the beam consists of charged particles, then these are usually of the same charge. Hence space charge effects can act to force the beam apart, either longitudinally or transversely. Neither is desirable.

Reiser describes many beam focusing techniques that have been developed over the decades to circumvent this problem. Quite impressive ingenuity. Some of the best experimental physicists have gone into this field, and their efforts are well summarised here.

Other non-accelerator applications are described. Though perhaps the most interesting to some of you have to be omitted by necessity. These are military applications, where particle beams might be used as antimissile defenses. (Star Wars.) ... Read more

Book Description

This volume describes the Pomeron, an object of crucial importance in very high energy particle physics. The first chapter looks at historical roots, setting the scene for subsequent chapters, which focus on the derivation and study of the Pomeron that emerge within perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). A simple toy model is first used to illustrate the basic ideas behind the construction of the Pomeron and leads naturally to the more realistic case of QCD. The reggeized gluon is introduced and used to build the Pomeron of perturbative QCD. The dynamical nature of the Pomeron is then investigated. The role of the Pomeron in small-x deep inelastic scattering and in diffractive scattering is examined in detail. The volume concludes with a discussion of the color dipole approach to high energy scattering and the explicit role of unitarity corrections. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

The definitive introduction to the pomeron
As an introduction to the BFKL equation and low x resummation in popular literature, this book is probably unsurpassed. I would recommend it to all students of QCD in the high energy limit. ... Read more

Book Description

Get ready to take another fantastic journey with physicist and author Robert Gilmore, this time with Dorothy, following the yellow building block road through the land of the Wizard of Quarks.Using characters and situations based on the universally known story, The Wizard of Oz, we learn along the way about the fascinating world of particle physics. Classes of particles, from quarks to leptons are shown in atomic garden, where atoms and molecules are produced; see how Dorothy, The Tin Geek, and the Cowardly Lion experience the bizarre world of subatomic particles. Thousands of readers who were delighted by the adventures and science content of Alice in Quantumland are in for another treat, with the prose and illustrations of Robert Gilmore. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

At Last!
At last the author of "Alice in Quantumland" has written another parody, mixing a well-known tale with modern quantum physics. My son enjoyed "Alice in Quantumland" when he was eight, and he will enjoy "The Wizard of Quarks" (based - loosely - on "The Wizard of Oz") now as a teenager. The books are quite charming and witty for adults, as well. ... Read more

Book Description

From April through December of 1945, ten of Nazi Germany's greatest nuclear physicists were detained by Allied military and intelligence services in a kind of "gilded cage" -- at Farm Hall, an English country manor near Cambridge, England. The physicists knew the Reich had failed to develop an atomic bomb, and they soon learned, from a BBC radio report on August 6, that the Allies had succeeded in their own efforts to create such a weapon. But what they did not know was that many of their meetings as well as private conversations were being monitored and recorded by British agents. Farm Hall was stately and comfortable, but it was a prison, and it was bugged.

This book contains the complete collection of transcripts that were made from the secret 1945 recordings. A startling and sobering set of documents, it provides an unprecedented view into the thoughts and feelings of these scientists as they contemplated the destruction of the Reich, their failure to deliver a bomb into Hitler's hands, and the state of their own consciences.

The Farm Hall transcripts, along with Bernstein's commentaries and a wide-ranging and thought-provoking introduction by historian David Cassidy, are an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand the history of physics and warfare.

Jeremy Bernstein was a staff writer covering science for The New Yorker for more than 30 years. The author of numerous books on science and Professor Emeritus of physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology, he is also the recipient of the John Case Award, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the Britannica Award, and the Gemant Award.

Reviews (3)

Get it from the horse's mouth, Werner Heisenberg himself.
This book consists of expertly annotated transcripts of conversations of German scientists taken at Farm Hall after the end of the WWII in Europe. The book is based on the recently de-classified "Farm Hall Transcripts", a revealing set of informative statements which demonstrates the low level of understanding that the German Scientists had of how to build Atomic Bombs. It is written and annotated by an American physicist, so you get some insights as to Heisenberg's mistakes. The book is a refutation of the book "Heisenberg's War" by Thomas Powers, a revisionist history that claims that Heisenberg, Germany's top scientist, really knew how an Atomic Bomb worked, but withheld this information from his colleagues and the German Government.

Heisenberg remains a mystery. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics in the early 1930s for his "Uncertainty Principle" which deals with Quantum Mechanics. Yet despite his brilliance, he sounds pretty ignorant at Farm Hall. Was he faking? I think not. To paraphrase Watergate: the question still is "What did Werner Heisenberg know and when did he know it? At Farm Hall, when he found out about Hiroshima, his ego deflated like an untied balloon. His comments were made at a vulnerable and candid moment. They reveal a knowledge one would expect from someone you picked at random at a shopping mall.

The Manhattan Project was at least as much engineering as science, and Heisenberg was more of a theologian than a nuts 'n bolts guy.

But hey, don't take my word for it. If you are really interested, I recommend this book along with "Heisenberg's War" so you get both sides. Then read "Alsos" by Samuel Goudschmidt, the scientific leader of the famous Alsos Mission, who along with Col. Boris T. Pash ("The Alsos Mission"), followed the allied armies into France and captured Heisenberg and the others. Goudschmidt was a physicist who offered the earliest (1947) and perhaps the most philosophical postmortem on the German A-bomb "program".

A biassed book
The author tells an interesting story about some of the most known german physicist and their role in the attempt to produce an atomic bomb. Unfortunatelly he does not tell the pure facts, he gives his personal interpretation on each comment made by the germans and tries to make you think that they wanted to produce a bomb at any cost, that one of the most famous physicist, Heisenberg, did not know enough nuclear physics and that everything Heisenberg said, was just to hide his failure. A biassed book.

A startling and sobering set of documents
Toward the end of World War II, ten German nuclear physicists were captured by American and British forces and sent to Farm Hall, An English country house near Cambridge for six months. While there they were interrogated about Germany's nuclear research. Farm Hall was a comfortable prison, but it was bugged and their every word was secretly monitored by British agents. Now in a revised and updated second edition, Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings At Farm Hall is a complete collection of transcripts made from those secret recordings in 1945. Expertly annotated by Jeremy Bernstein and put in context by Bernstein (and with an informative introduction by David Cassidy). This startling and sobering set of documents provide an insight into the thoughts and feelings of these ten scientists as they considered the destruction of the Third Reich, the failure of their beloved "German Physics", and the roles they played in the Nazi war effort. Hitler's Uranium Club is a unique, informative, invaluable, and at times unsettling contribution to World War II studies. ... Read more

Book Description

Reprint of a classical book first published in 1950. This lucid and profound exposition of Einstein's 1915 theory of gravitation is essential reading. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

an excellent companion
I've turned to this thin book far too many times to count. It was also a life-saver when I was learning General Relativity because of its clear and careful exposition. Schrodinger was doing this back when nobody was quite sure what the deal was with, e.g., index notation, and he took pains to lay out the benefits -- but also the limits -- of that system. See, for example, his discussion of the derivative operator, something that is almost always glossed over.

I'm in the middle of my dissertation now, and every now and then I hit on a subtlety in GR that my advisor has missed but I caught from reading this book.

Don't get thinking that this is Schrodinger's book on the unified field. It is more like the lecture notes of a very intelligent man figuring out what on Earth this truly new version of gravity is all about.

In the end of course this book is too slim to live on its own as a GR text. You will need to carry around a bigger, more comprehensive tome to get through your studies. As a handguide and emergency sense-maker, however, it has few equals.

A good text with unique information
I am an advanced undergraduate physics student who has started to go through Space-Time Structure. It seems to be a very good book, but the section introducing tensors was not as lucid as it could be. If you already know tensors or have a good book like Shaum's Outline of Tensor Calculus, then it can be a very useful introduction to the affine viewpoint of relativity that Schrodinger promotes. The discussion of nonsymmetric unified field theories is introductory and it would be necessary to look up the references it cites to get a more in depth understanding of them.

unified field theory
This book presents the results of Schroedinger's work in Ireland in which he explored the manifold of possibilities for unified field theories along the general lines pursued by Einstein. The main accomplishment was in constructing such a theory from just the connection, with metric derived as a consequence, using no ad hoc assumptions. I extended this work in my 1977 Master's thesis. While this kind of theory has gone out of style, it is still an exciting pursuit and Schroedinger's writing is clear and compelling.

Time Structure
I'm twelve right about now, and I have my own theory of time.Time (the fourth dimension) is arranged on separate lines, like thefirst dimension. The fifth dimension is arranged in time planes and the sixth in time cubes. The fourth dimension, however, is simpler than those. Imagine infinite lines in space, each stacked one on another. These we will call "time lines". From these infinite lines spread more infinite lines. We'll call these "destiny lines". Then there are more and more destiny lines branching from those destiny lines, and so on and so forth. They get very complicated. Time lines are the original paths of time. Destiny lines are the lines of time determined by what happens along the time lines. Sounds confusing? Well, anything you do creates a new destiny line. As I write this, I am creating a new destiny line. The future may be different if I didn't write this at all. Time planes are the collection of one timeline and all destiny lines spreading from it. Time cubes are the colletion of all time planes. It's kinda weird ;) ... Read more

Book Description

This much-needed book -- the most comprehensive, up-to-date text available on nuclear physics -- expertly details the numerous theoretical techniques central to the discipline.It is based on lecture notes from a three-lecture series given at CEBAF (the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility), where John Dirk Walecka was at the time Scientific Director: Graduate Quantum Mechanics, Advanced Quantum Mechanics and Field Theory, and Special Topics in Nuclear Physics.The primary goal of this text is pedagogical; providing a clear, logical, in-depth, and unifying treatment of many diverse aspects of modern nuclear theory ranging from the non-relativistic many-body problem to the standard model of the strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions.Four key topics are emphasized: basic nuclear structure, the relativistic nuclear many-body problem, strong-coupling QCD, and electroweak interactions with nuclei.The text is designed to provide graduate students with a basic level of understanding of modern nuclear physics so that they in turn can explore the scientific frontiers. Written by an eminent authority in the field, it will be welcomed by graduate students and researchers alike. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Good Book
This book is more of an advanced level reading for graduate students pursuing careers in particle physics. The basic content is refreshing and I am glad that the explanation of accelerated particles was established early in the book, which gave meat to he later context. Overall, I give this book a three-star, because many theories were repeated throughout the book, which got a little annoying. ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (3)

From one physisict to another
This is an interesting biography for it is written by a friend with same interests and loyalty to each other. No jealosy, no envie but appreciation and loyalty how nice. This is the story of Fermi mostly about his intellectual and social life and not about his private life and that part is in fact covered very nicely by his wife in her beautiful book. Segre without any short cuts describe Fermi, his behaior, his mastery in physics with all important documents reproduced and day by day their successes and few dissappointments. There are certain scientific explanations about the experiments they conducted days in and days out and if you are not into Atomic physics those explanations are just words but even if you do not know what they are doing you still get the pleasure of visualising masters in action. descriptions are very vivid. Hard work is necessary but knowing what you are doing is more important and this book along with the biographies of other master Physisist shows the same. Prof Serge is exteremely good in writing biography, you do not get bored while reading the book. All the surroundings, social and political world conditions are clearly described, showing the conditions these people had to go through and yet was exteremely productive.

A Scientist to Remember
The book was filled with many pages of interesting info that I found informative and enjoyable to read as a literature teacher. It was composed with inciteful quotes that can influence the reader. Finally, I would advise anyone interested in reading about a great man like this one should go out and buy this book

The master described by the pupil, both Nobel winners
This is the best researched biography of the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, the last universalist in physics, in what concerns science and education. For the private life of the great man and for the less formal aspects of his life, the best book is "Atoms in Family", by his wife, Laura Fermi. Both are remarkable books. The book by Segre, who himself won the Nobel prize for the first observation of the anti-proton, besides being very well written, has some features of his own. First, there is, in an appendix, a series of letters exchanged between Fermi and Persico, another distinguished physicist, of about the same age, which talk mainly of education:which book to use for thermodynamics (Planck), how to study, progresses in some researches, etc. Second, an interview with a friend of Fermi's father, the engineer Amidei, who had a great influence on the education of teenager Fermi, by lending him books he assumed would be important for his future. Among t! hese books is the Mecanique (mechanics) of Poisson, which remained impressed in Fermi's memory forever. The list of these books, with the dates when they were taken and given back, is there. Fermi's style, the simplicity that comes from deep knowledge, is exemplified in many occasions. Perhaps the best story is that of the malfunctioning of Compton's watch; or the first measurement of the power of the first nuclear explosion, made by Fermi by measurind the displacement caused by the shock wave on little scraps of paper released when the first light from the explosion arrived. I read this book at least ten times. I know I will read it again many times. ... Read more

Book Description

The Neurons in Action tutorials are unique CD-ROM-based learning tools that combine text with computer simulations of laboratory experiments in neurophysiology. Using the professional research simulator NEURON*, students perform experiments to affect the generation of action potentials, synaptic potentials, and the spread or propagation of voltages within a neuron. Parameters that are under the student's control include neuronal geometry, ion concentrations, ion channel density, degree of myelination, and, for a synapse, its conductance, reversal potential, timecourse, and location on dendrites.

With its novel use of interactive movies, Neurons in Action allows the student to visualize changing voltage patterns not only in time but in space, providing insight into nerve function that is simply not possible with conventional text and figure presentations.

The Neurons in Action tutorials, organized into three levels of difficulty, may be used for beginning as well as advanced students. The Partial Demyelination Tutorial is especially useful for medical students. NeuroLab's simulations can enhance the impact of lectures and conferences where the students can immediately see the effects of parameter changes, channel blocking by toxins, etc. The simulations provide definitive answers to questions raised by students as well as queries posed by the instructor.

The tutorials guide the student in managing the panels that control simulations and the windows that plot the experimental observations. Because Neurons in Action documents are written in HTML format and displayed by an internet browser, the student can make extensive use of hyperlinks to answer questions raised by the tutorials and to extend the information supporting the experiments. The text may be read on the computer monitor or from the published manual accompanying the CD-ROM.

The CD includes, in the Appendix, an extensive discussion of the origin of the Hodgkin-Huxley equations as well as PDF files of the Hodgkin-Huxley papers (and other classic papers) hyperlinked to the text of the tutorials. ... Read more

Book Description

The announcement of cold fusion in March 1989 at the University of Utah was greeted with astonishment worldwide.Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons had claimed that an electrochemical cell with heavy water electrolyte and a palladium cathode gave rise to so much excess energy that the mysterious phenomenon had to be nuclear, and was probably a process related to nuclear fusion.Many scientists quickly took sides for or against cold fusion--mostly against.By the end of the summer the experts claimed cold fusion didn't exist.They said it was an experimental error and could not be reproduced.Actually, the story had barely begun.Provocative research had never ended.Cold fusion was and is very much alive.IN THIS BOOK, Dr. Mizuno describes both the dark and bright sides of the cold fusion story: the frustration, the boredom, the endless guerrilla war with scientists who wanted to stop the research, science journalists who appeared to thrive on the outpouring of supposedly negative results, fruitless battles to publish a paper or be heard at a physics conference, but then also the triumph of dramatic experimental results in the production of huge excess energy and the paradigm busting discovery of the low-energy transmutation of heavy elements found on cold fusion electrodes.It is impossible for one book to encompass the now expanding worldwide effort to understand the cold fusion enigma, but for those who want to learn about the rest of the story, this account of one scientist's experience on the frontiers of knowledge is an excellent beginning. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Valuable for Anyone Interested in New Energy
This English translation of Tadahiko Mizuno's Japanese book on cold fusion served as a valuable introduction to significant research and progress in a scientific process many have written off as unachievable. In recounting his personal research with electrochemical cells designed to produce a practical source of energy, Dr. Mizuno tells a story of many failures and a few successes. Clearly, reproducibility and consistent power production have been significant problems in producing energy by cold fusion. Though Mizuno was forced to work under conditions that would be regarded as difficult and unacceptable in much of Europe and the U.S., this persevering researcher slowly learned important factors that relate to the goal of achieving a sustained, controlled, and repeatable cold fusion. The obstacles faced by Mizuno were not limited to poor laboratory equipment or the expense of crucial materials, for he also was required to perform the time-consuming teaching duties of a professor and direct or restrict his research and publication efforts as required by authorities. Dr. Mizuno seems to understand what engineers know quite well: a valid theory facilitates the design of a device by proceeding with a design based upon the knowledge of electrical, chemical, and physical properties of materials. I quite enjoyed those parts of the book that revealed the human qualities of Dr. Mizuno as he struggled towards his personal goal of demonstrating cold fusion. At times, he shares a moment of philsophical reflection, showing delightful sides of his personality and character. For a novice in cold fusion research, the glossary proved indispensable. Here, terms are carefully defined, instrumentation functions are described, energy relationships are listed, chemical reactions are explained, and acronymns are expanded. Most readers can learn a lot of basic material on cold fusion by just reading the glossary. The book includes a bibliography of references, an index of topics, and an eight-page cold fusion chronology describing key events from 1967 to 1999. Experienced cold fusion researchers will want to read this book to see if they are named in it and to follow the path to knowledge taken by one of their greatest colleagues. Novices interested in this subject will find that this book tells a readable, event-driven story that teaches as it informs. ... Read more

Book Description

This book deals with 2-spinors in general relativity, beginning by developing spinors in a geometrical way rather than using representation theory, which can be a little abstract. This gives the reader greater physical intuition into the way in which spinors behave. The book concentrates on the algebra and calculus of spinors connected with curved space-time. Many of the well-known tensor fields in general relativity are shown to have spinor counterparts. An analysis of the Lanczos spinor concludes the book, and some of the techniques so far encountered are applied to this. Exercises play an important role throughout and are given at the end of each chapter. ... Read more

Book Description

For more than ten years, ... Read more

Book Description

An uncommonly clear and cogent investigation and correlation of key aspects of theoretical nuclear physics by leading experts: the nucleus, nuclear forces, nuclear spectroscopy, two-, three- and four-body problems, nuclear reactions, beta-decay and nuclear shell structure. Directed to the experimental physicist working in nuclear physics or graduate students who know the essential concepts and problems. 112 illustrations.
... Read more

Book Description

This volume gives an account of modern knowledge of Regge Theory and QCD, an active area of high-energy particle-physics research. It records what has been learned in the past, what is relevant now, and what is essential for the future. The authors cover forty years of research and provide unique insight into the theory and its phenomenological development. The phenomenology is applied to a variety of reactions and is compared extensively with experiment. This is essential reading for particle physicists and is suitable as a graduate textbook. ... Read more

Book Description

This is a systematic presentation of Quantum Field Theory from first principles, emphasizing both theoretical concepts and experimental applications. Starting from introductory quantum and classical mechanics, this book develops the quantum field theories that make up the "Standard Model" of elementary processes.It derives the basic techniques and theorems that underly theory and experiment, including those that are the subject of theoretical development. Special attention is also given to the derivations of cross sections relevant to current high-energy experiments and to perturbative quantum chromodynamics, with examples drawn from electron-positron annihilation, deeply inelastic scattering and hadron-hadron scattering. The first half of the book introduces the basic ideas of field theory.The discussion of mathematical issues is everywhere pedagogical and self contained. Topics include the role of internal symmetry and relativistic invariance, the path integral, gauge theories and spontaneous symmetry breaking, and cross sections in the Standard Model and the parton model. The material of this half is sufficient for an understanding of the Standard Model and its basic experimental consequences. The second half of the book deals with perturbative field theory beyond the lowest-order approximation. The issues of renormalization and unitarity, the renormalization group and asymptotic freedom, infrared divergences in quantum electrodynamics and infrared safety in quantum chromodynamics, jets, the perturbative basis of factorization at high energy and the operator product expansion are discussed. Exercises are included for each chapter, and several appendices complement the text. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

the book is self-contained but poor as a reference
chapters 1 through 8 provide a good introduction to scalar field theory,path integrals,feynman diagrams and vector fields and gauge theories. the discussion on the standard model is not so good and the chapters on renormalization were not clear to me as a beginning student.the book requires one to go over the material very carefully,and should not, in my opinion, be used as a reference for a particular topic as every chapter draws heavily on the previous ones. however it is certainly suitable as a text for a 2 semester graduate course. ... Read more

Reviews (9)

Very interesting and easy to read
This book was written nearly 50 years ago in the 1950's, so naturally some of the stories are incomplete with todays hindsight, but I wish I'd read this book 20 years ago. It is extremely well written, and full of fascinating anecdotes. Although I am familiar with many of the characters & stories, there was something new for me in every chapter, for example the insights into Oppenheimer in Germany before WWII. It would be wonderful if a revised version could be published incorporating the story of the Soviet Atom Scientists.

Historical Revisionism at its worst
While an easy to read book, Jungk presents some false information that depreciates the value of the book.

The first is the impression that Von Weisacker and other German scientists attempted to give to the post war world, that they were not really trying to build a bomb, but were merely interested in nuclear power. This is refuted by Jeremy Bernstein, in his book "Hitler's Uranium Club." The historical record shows that there were many memorandums sent to the German Military, by the scientists, about the possibility of producing an atomic bomb.

The more serious misstatement however, is about Klaus Fuchs' espionage on the Manhattan Project which was the most damaging espionage committed by any of the atomic spies of that era. Jungk claims that Fuchs decided to spy for the Soviet Union when he learned about plans to bomb Hiroshima. This is so off base that one has to question Jungk's scholarship or motives. Here is why: Fuchs began spying for the Soviets in 1941 in Britain, before Pearl Harbor and before there was even a Manhattan Project. The decision to acutally bomb Hiroshima was made in 1945. None of the scientists know what the targets were.

This is such a huge distortion of the facts that it should be mentioned in any review of this book. The book has lots of details but if you buy it, beware of some of the downright distortions of history. A better choice is Richard Rhodes's book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb".

Jungk's history is far from Junk.
Often times, books loose a great deal when translated. I haven't read the original German version of this book, but the English version is so captivating that I can't imagine much was lost in the change of language.

If you want to learn more, not only about the scientists who developed the bomb, but the issues surrounding its use and further development you can't to better than this book. It is exceptionally well written, and superbly translated. It's fabulous to have a record so well researched written by someone in a position that is far more objective than an American's would have been at that time.

The book starts you off after World War I in Göttingen, the mecca for scientific thought at the time. The early chapters lay an excellent foundation for the readers understanding of the issues surrounding the development of the atomic bomb.

The account of the research at Los Alamos is very well covered, and Jungk avoids going to deeply into the technical aspects of the research. This makes it accessible to anyone, regardless of their depth of scientific knowledge. (I also recommend Richard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" for an anecdotal, and more whimsical account of the Los Alamos research.)

The most fascinating part of the book for me was the discussion of the events leading up to the use of the atomic bomb in Japan. I have used this book many times as a source for arguing that the atomic assault on Japan was not necessary. The unique thing that "...Suns" provides is the perspective of the scientist's involved. Instead of only discussing the political aspect, and occasionally mentioning Oppenheimer or Teller, as other texts about the bomb tend to do, Jungk gives the reader clear view of the scientist's perspective on military deployment of an atomic weapon. (The Franck Report is appended.)

Finally, the beginning of the arms race is explored, up through Russia's and the United States' development of hydrogen bombs. No doubt this section would have been more complete had the book been written later. However, I found that reading the book now, with the knowledge of the extent of the cold war and the arms race makes reading the perspective of someone who was witnessing the beginnings of it even more interesting.

One usually does not think of history as something that enthralls so deeply as this book does. It is perhaps the most engaging book I have ever read.

Concise
I read this as a follow up to 'the making of the Atomic Bomb'. It didn't just rehash what I had already read. Lot's of fresh material and interesting insights.

Better than a thriller
It was shear chance that I came across this book in the library. I have read it twice already and I think I will buy it. Definitely a collectors item for those who are even half as interested as I am in the facts about the bomb and the world war. ... Read more

Book Description

This book gives a detailed account of the Standard Model of particle physics, focusing on the techniques by which the model can produce information about real observed phenomena. It opens with a pedagogic account of the theory of the Standard Model. Introductions to the essential calculational techniques are included. The major part of the text is concerned with the use of the Standard Model in the calculation of physical properties of particles. Rigorous and reliable methods (radiative corrections and nonperturbative techniques based on symmetries and anomalies) are emphasized, but other useful models (such as the quark and Skyrme models) are also described. The strong andelectroweak interactions are not treated as independent threads but rather are woven together into a unified phenomenological fabric. Many exercises and diagrams are included. ... Read more