Robert Oerter

Although not a physicist (a neuroscientist instead), I've read quite a few popular science physics books in my time, with Brian Greene one of my favourite authors (Simon Singh is close behind), but although this book isn't long, I felt it took me far further into the meat of modern physics than any of them, and that by the end I really had a much deeper grasp of the Standard Model. For this reason alone, I'm a big fan of the book.

Its style is at times rather personal and irreverent, which I always love in a popular science book - why hide your own personality behind ideas? Let it out and use it as a hook to further engage the reader. Oerter at times shies away from taking a historical view of the subject, but breaks this rule frequently when it will help explain the science, or even just add some context to it. I was very happy for this somewhat flexible approach as well.

Much of the science is explained clearly, with little or no mathematics, but my only gripe with the book was that there were some ideas that were just too obscure and difficult to follow. This is more true of the latter part of the book than the former. I was left wondering if there is any hope for a layperson to grasp these ideas without the maths, or if Oerter could have made these concepts clearer.

Still, despite the odd somewhat impenetrable passage, I think this is a wonderful book for expanding one's knowledge about modern physics. And it's made me feel confident enough now to search for deeper explanations, either in popular science books with more maths, or physics text books.

(Any recommendations for the next stage would be greatly received!)… (más)

Minireview: A slim and somewhat sketchy popular introduction to the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. While Oerter emphasizes that this is not a history, logical development often leads him to follow a roughly historical route, making the book suffer in comparison to Crease and Mann's excellent history, The Second Creation. This work also seems to be pitched at a somewhat lower level than Crease and Mann, though it does address some issues they gloss over (and vice versa). The strangest omission I noticed was the lack of mention of the electroweak hierarchy problem (the cosmological hierarchy problem is brought up briefly). While primarily an aesthetic 'problem', this is one of the main motivations for developing theories beyond the Standard Model. This leads to supersymmetry being introduced just "because-it's-there" (260), then justified through the possibility of coupling constant unification in supersymmetric grand unified theories.… (más)