Award-winning physicist and science popularizer Sean Carroll reveals the history-making forces of insight, rivalry, and wonder that fuelled the Higgs search and how its discovery opens a door into the mind-boggling domain of dark matter and other phenomena we never predicted. Told with unrivalled ambition, authority, and access to the teams, this is the greatest science story of our time – riveting and irresistible.
Sean Carroll is the author of the acclaimed From Eternity to Here and a star of theoretical physics based at the California Institute of Technology. He is also one of the founders of cosmicvariance.com, named as a top 5 science blog by Nature, and a TV presenter.
"An authoritative account of science's discovery of the year. Remarkable."
– Financial Times
"This book is so hard to put down. That's testament to Carroll, a practising scientist, also being a gifted writer."
– New Scientist
"Compelling."
– Independent
"A very good – and very accessible – guide to all the theoretical physics, precision engineering, data handling, probability-measuring and other marvels."
– Guardian
"Delightful [...] for anyone excited by the particle at the end of the universe, start here."
– BBC Focus
"Carroll keeps it real, getting at the complex guts of cutting-edge cosmology in discussions that will challenge fans of Hawking's A Brief History of Time."
– Washington Post
"The science is authoritative, yet bold and lively. The narrative is richly documented, yet full of human drama. Carroll's saga pulls you aboard a modern voyage of discovery."
– Frank Wilczek, Nobel Laureate in Physics and author of A Beautiful Question
"In this superb book, Sean Carroll provides a fascinating and lucid look at the most mysterious and important particle in nature, and the experiment that revealed it. Anyone with an interest in physics should read this, and join him in examining the new worlds of physics to which this discovery may lead."
– Leonard Mlodinow, internationally bestselling author of Subliminal and Elastic