Dealing with the fundamental scientific question, "What is the world made of?", Leon Lederman, who shared the physics Nobel Prize in 1988, tells the story of the 2500-year quest for its answer, taking the reader on a journey from the philosophies of the ancient Greeks to the astonishing scientific discoveries of the last 50 years. It was a Greek philosopher in the 5th century BC who guessed that an invisible particle might be the basic building-block of all matter. He called it an "atom" - that which cannot be cut. The past ...
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Dealing with the fundamental scientific question, "What is the world made of?", Leon Lederman, who shared the physics Nobel Prize in 1988, tells the story of the 2500-year quest for its answer, taking the reader on a journey from the philosophies of the ancient Greeks to the astonishing scientific discoveries of the last 50 years. It was a Greek philosopher in the 5th century BC who guessed that an invisible particle might be the basic building-block of all matter. He called it an "atom" - that which cannot be cut. The past five decades have brought the development of the most complex experimental tool ever built, the particle accelerator, which cuts matter into quarks and leptons, and reveals the forces that drive them. Lederman believes we may be close to discovering the ultimate atom - the "god particle" - which orchestrates the cosmic symphony, and that its discovery may reduce the laws of physics to an equation so simple that it can fit onto a T-shirt.
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