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The God Particle
I picked up Leon Lederman’s The God Particle because the quote on the front of the book claims it as “The funniest book about physics ever written,” and the quote on the back hails Lederman as the Stephen Hawking of particle physics. Being that A Brief History of Time is one of my favorite books and I’d never encountered a book about physics that was deemed hilarious, those quotes were enough to reel me in.
Indeed, Lederman’s book is both incredibly fascinating and highly entertaining. Further comments on everything I learned about the wonders of quarks, leptons, and the Higg’s particle would surely be too boring for this blog. But I wanted to include one of my favorite paragraphs from his book here:
“Thousands of years hence, archaeologists and anthropologists may judge our culture by our accelerators. After all, they are the largest machines our civilization has ever built. Today we visit Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids, and we marvel at the technological achievement of building them. But they had a scientific purpose as well; they were crude “observatories” for tracking astronomical bodies. So we must also stand in awe of how ancient cultures were driven to erect grand structures in order to measure the movements of the heavens in an attempt to understand and live in harmony with the universe. Form and function combined in the pyramids and Stonehenge allow their creators to seek scientific truths. Accelerators are our pyramids, our Stonehenge” (255).
I found his unlikely comparison of particle accelerators with beautiful structures such as the pyramids to be very poetic, and was struck by the observation that all of these creations have in common the desire to “live in harmony with the universe.”
