This book explores the concepts, ideas, and experimental results that brought us from the discovery of the first elementary particle in the end of the 19th century to the completion of the Standard Model of particle physics in the early 21st century.
"In this brief book Pohl (emer., Univ. of Geneva) provides a broad, fast-moving mix of particle physics theory, experiment, and history suitable for a wide range of interested readers. At the same time, the book will be a stimulating resource for instructors. Chapter 6 ("War-Time Physics") captures a pivotal period in modern physics and discusses how modern particle physics, more than any other subdiscipline of physics, inherits the full weight of the concerns, responsibility, and guilt of that time. Also noteworthy is chapter 8 ("Enabling Technologies"), a brief but informed perspective on experimental techniques. This chapter features an unusual section on failed projects, a subject almost universally ignored in scientific history. Technical discussions and equations are enclosed in focus boxes in most chapters, and therefore do not interrupt the flow of the text. The longest chapters, appropriately enough, are chapters 5 and 9 (respectively, "Quanta" and "The Standard Model of Matter and Forces"). A final chapter ("Pushing the Boundaries") addresses contemporary research on dark matter, dark energy, and quantum gravity. This is a good book that can appeal to many different audiences, containing some unusual material not easily found?elsewhere.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. General readers."
-M. C. Ogilvie, Washington University in CHOICE, October 2021
"Martin Pohl packs a century of particle physics between two book covers. Particles, Fields, Space-Time: From Thomson's Electron to Higgs' Boson - this is the title of the 300-page book recently presented by Martin Pohl. The author brings a lifetime of passionate research and university teaching into this work. The wide-ranging knowledge of an academic career gives the book weight and defines its claim?Anyone who wants to deal intensively with a good century of particle physics research will be offered an extremely detailed overview by Martin Pohl, which includes social references and reflections on the history of science?The book chooses the discovery of the electron in the late 19th century as its pivotal point. This major scientific achievement marks the beginning of particle physics as a new fundamental discipline and at the same time the beginning of the momentous triumph of electronics, as Martin Pohl aptly notes. The author introduces the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics as well as their later connection to quantum field theory, and he traces the steps that led to the Standard Model of particle physics in the 1960s and early 1970s? In his book, Pohl not only provides a detailed account of the Standard Model, but also discusses the research approaches that are working towards physics beyond the Standard Model?Martin Pohl's book is also written in English, and that is quite typical for particle physics, whose research community has left national borders behind like hardly any other. A bibliography and a keyword index form the helpful conclusion of Pohl's account."
-?Benedikt Vogel, Swiss Institute of Particle Physics
