A Map of the Invisible

A magnificent, compelling and insightful voyage to the frontier of knowledge from a great writer with a deep understanding. – Brian CoxYearning for a late holiday? Bosonia, the Isle of Leptons and farthest Antimatter beckon in this bracing voyage into particle physics, captained by experimental physicist Jon Butterworth. Ever an original writer, he maps the territory of the standard model and beyond, elucidating in turn wave–particle duality, the quantum field and the subatomic realm, all the way to ripples in space-time and the hunt for the Higgs boson (which, as a veteran of the Large Hadron Collider at Europe’s physics lab CERN, he navigates expertly). Sea legs achieved, you’re ready for wilder shores, such as the Dirac–Milne universe. * Nature *

Jon Butterworth is currently Head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL and works on the ATLAS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He studied at the University of Oxford, receiving a DPhil in particle physics in 1992. He is the author of Smashing Physics, and of the ‘Life and Physics’ blog for the Guardian.