BeigeJournal

Hidden Worlds: Hunting for Quarks in Ordinary Matter, by Timothy Paul Smith. Princeton University Press, 2002.

I thought this was a fantastic book, very interesting and fun to read. It’s about the familiar nucleons, the ordinary up and down quarks that they are made from, and the historical as well as current efforts to understand them. Although the frontiers of high-energy physics have moved on beyond the nucleons, there is much left to learn about them, and, since nucleons are what stuff is made of, they are of special interest.

The book contains quite a bit about the interplay between theory and experiment. It gives moderately detailed overviews of a few particular experiments and their accelerators and detectors, rather than trying to touch on everything. It is a largely math-free book and is obviously meant for the curious non-physicist, but does assume some knowledge of physics.