Publication day! In case it's slipped your mind, today is the day when The Particle at the End of the Universe officially goes on sale. Books get a bit of a boost if they climb up the Amazon rankings on the first day, so if you are so inclined, today would be the day to click that button. Also: great holiday present for the whole family! A very nice review by Michael Brooks appeared in New Scientist. (It's always good to read a review when you can tell the author actually read the book.) Another good one by John Butterworth appeared in Nature, but behind a paywall. Brief reminder of fun upcoming events:
Today (Tuesday the 13th), you can Ask Me Anything over at Reddit, starting at 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific. Of course you lovely blog readers already know everything worth knowing, but I'm looking forward to dodging personal queries from people around the world. (And hopefully explaining a little physics.)
Thursday I'll be doing an online chat in a platform called Shindig. That's 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific. Fire up your webcam and you can be part of the virtual audience.
FAQ: Yes, you should have no trouble reading and understanding it, no matter what your physics background may be. Yes, there are electronic editions of various forms. Yes, there will also be an audio book, but it's still being recorded. No, nobody has yet purchased the movie rights; call me. Yes, I know that the Higgs boson is not literally sitting there at the end of the universe. It's a metaphor; for more explanation, read the book! Writing this book has been quite an experience. Unlike From Eternity to Here, in this case I wasn't writing about my own research interests. So for much of the time I was acting like a journalist, talking to the people who really built the Large Hadron Collider and do the experiments there. It's no exaggeration that I went into the project with an enormous amount of respect for what they accomplished, and came out with enormously more than that. It's a truly amazing achievement on the part of thousands of dedicated people who are largely anonymous to the outside world. (But for the rest of their lives they get to say "I helped discover the Higgs boson," which is pretty cool.) Of course, being who I am, I couldn't help but take the opportunity to try to explain some physics that doesn't often get explained. So once you hit the halfway point in the book or so, we start digging into what quantum field theory really is, why symmetry breaking is important, and the fascinating history of how the Higgs mechanism was developed. (I had to restrain myself from going even deeper, especially into issues of spin and chirality, but this is supposed to be a bodice-ripper, not a brain-flattener.) At the end of the book, as a reward, you get to contemplate the role of the internet and bloggers in the changing landscape of scientific communication, as well as all the fun technological breakthroughs that we will get as a result of the Higgs discovery. (I.e., none whatsoever.) Hope you like reading it as much as I liked writing it.
