Non-Fiction Review by C. Allen
“Beauty can be a difficult thing to understand, and an even more difficult thing to define. Although we all have some idea of what it means for something to be beautiful, it is very hard to put our fingers on the appeal of a beautiful sound, image, or idea.” This is just a snippet of a long and beautiful passage that acts as a forerunner to a book written by a man whose passion for physics and love for science transcends that of most science authors.
“Beauty can be a difficult thing to understand, and an even more difficult thing to define. Although we all have some idea of what it means for something to be beautiful, it is very hard to put our fingers on the appeal of a beautiful sound, image, or idea.” This is just a snippet of a long and beautiful passage that acts as a forerunner to a book written by a man whose passion for physics and love for science transcends that of most science authors.
Dan Hooper captures so beautifully not only the wonder of physics, but its incredibly rich history. Covering such scientific innovators as Heisenberg, Einstein, James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, Niels Bohr, and many more, Hooper unfolds the amazing history of quantum field theory and particle physics over the last 100+ years. A slow and grueling process all aimed at defining the built in and unseen mosaic of subatomic particles, energies and vacuums around us all of the time, whether we know about it and understand it or not.
His descriptions and analogies of how these particles work, interact with one another, makeup many other necessary particles and even make up the building blocks of every fermion piece of matter around us, is legible, articulate, and seems, at many times, to transcend a science book, and more resemble a personal autobiography.
The book mainly revolves around supersymmetry (SUSY), which is a theory of physics relating to masons and baryons (bosons) in the context of hadronic physics. In essence, supersymmetry relates to elementary particles and their superpartners which differ by one-half unit of spin. This original theory was the forerunner of our understanding of quarks, antimatter, the resolution of quantum gravity and Einstein’s special theory of relativity, as well as a possible future understanding of dark matter.
Dan Hooper provides analogies, interpretations of all kinds, diagrams, and much more to help the reader better understand these quantum particles which encompass the book, and these devices also make this book a very light read that would be very easy to pick up by anyone unfamiliar with quantum physics, physics, theoretical physics, or even basic science. I, for one, though I’ve always had a fondness for physics, have always struggled with the concept of antimatter, how it’s created, and quite frankly, where it all is, as our universe consists of mainly matter. If matter cannot exist without a partnering antimatter, then where is all of it? Why is our universe almost entirely made up of matter? Well, now I know the answer, simply because of the way this book is written.
Honestly, I would have to give this book an easy 5-star Nerd Factor, and because of the way it’s written, an easy 5-stars in general. While Dan Hooper is also the author of Dark Cosmos, this book makes me wish I could master warp drive, allowing me to fly at 99% the speed of light for a couple of years, and return to earth (40 actual years having passed) so that I could read future pieces by this brilliant physicist and beyond-brilliant author.
Critic’s Note: Dan Hooper is from my home state, but I assure you that this review holds no bias because of this. While he was born in Cold Spring , Minnesota , he attended college at the University of Wisconsin
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