Since its completion in 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been the focus of a lot of news coverage. It is by far the largest scientific project in history, and very likely the last such project for the foreseeable future. And yet, it has been fairly difficult to explain to the general public the exact purpose of LHC and what sorts of questions are the scientists trying to answer by culling over its experimental results. One of the things that LHC is trying to find is the putative “Higgs boson,” whose existence has been postulated for almost half a century, and without which much of our understanding of particle physics would be incomplete. However, the reasons for the need of the Higgs boson are very hard to express in the layman’s terms. It is the particle that gives all the other particles mass, and without it (or something like it) it would be impossible to justify many of the theoretical results that have proven so incredibly insightful over the past few decades. Some popularizes of science have even resorted to calling it “the God particle,” which in my opinion is one of the most unfortunate and gratuitously obscure “descriptions” of any phenomenon in all of science.

In “The Infinity Puzzle” Frank Close delves deep into the theoretical background that has lead to the postulation of the Higgs Boson. Higgs Boson turns out to be an indispensable ingredient for the theoretical formulation of the electroweak theory – the unified theory of electromagnetic and weak interactions. The modern formulation of that theory, the so-called Glashow-Weinberg-Salam model, has come at the end of a long series of abortive attempts at unification, and has been followed by even a longer succession of theoretical and experimental verifications. The discovery of the Higgs Boson would be the final validation of that model, and it would also potentially shed some light on the rest of the Standard Model of particles and fields.

This book primarily focuses on personal histories of many of the actors that have contributed to the electroweak theory and experiment, going all the way back to the middle of the twentieth century. These are fascinating personal stories that have been long overdue for a comprehensive popular treatment. Even people like myself whose professional careers have been influenced by the electroweak and similar theories (known as “gauge theories”) have a rudimentary knowledge of their historical development. However, I was hoping that this book would be more focused on physics in its own right, and much less concerned with history. I’ve read several other books by Frank Close (“Nothing: A very Short introduction,” “Neutrino”) and from reading those I’ve come impressed by Close’s ability to present complex physical ideas in an accessible and highly informative manner. “The Infinity Puzzle” turns out to be a very different kind of book. Aside from being overly historical, it also spends too much time on “inside baseball” minutia and arcana that even those who are inside baseball will probably just skip over. I am really not interested in getting the information straight on who presented which scientific talk in what form back in the early 1970s, and I can’t imagine that most readers of this book would care much about this either. This is a very interesting and accessible book, but I am afraid that the choice of topics might be too recondite for the kind of audience that this book is aimed at.