The Particle Garden: Our Universe as Understood by Particle Physicists (Helix books) [Paperback]

So readers curious about the ultimate building blocks of matter (quarks and leptons) and the interactions between them (gauge bosons) will definitely benefit from this book. Kane also gives a brief account of the different accelerators and colliders engaged in testing the standard model and detecting the various quarks, leptons and bosons as predicted by the standard model(which until now has come out with flying colors, making it one of the most successful, well tested and mathematically rigorous theories yet). Kane also discusses the Higgs mechanism, which is responsible for imparting mass to the particles. This is still an active research area and the race is still on to detect the Higgs boson, which is a quantum of the Higgs field - in the bigger colliders such as the Tevatron collider in Fermilab and the LEP in CERN. If the results are still negative then the focus will shift to the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN which will start operating in 2005. Other areas of discussion in this book is the extended model of the Standard Theory like supersymmetric standard theory, CP violation, dark matter, baryon asymmetry etc...

Readers will greatly benefit if they could visit this web site - which I think provides a great and excellent introduction to the standard model and will complement "the particle garden". Also recommended is John Gribbin's - "Q is for Quantum - an encyclopedia of particle physics", which will definitely prove to be an invaluable source for anything and everything you wanted to know about particle physics.

The book is a bit dated(1996) and lacks charts and particle interactions equations which, I think, should have been provided appropriately to help the readers get a more better grasp on the subject and make it a more enjoyable learning experience. Apart from this grievance, Kane does a pretty good job of teaching and explaining the wonderful and complex world of particle physics.

So readers curious about the ultimate building blocks of matter (quarks and leptons) and the interactions between them (gauge bosons) will definitely benefit from this book. Kane also gives a brief account of the different accelerators and colliders engaged in testing the standard model and detecting the various quarks, leptons and bosons as predicted by the standard model(which until now has come out with flying colors, making it one of the most successful, well tested and mathematically rigorous theories yet). Kane also discusses the Higgs mechanism, which is responsible for imparting mass to the particles. This is still an active research area and the race is still on to detect the Higgs boson, which is a quantum of the Higgs field - in the bigger colliders such as the Tevatron collider in Fermilab and the LEP in CERN. If the results are still negative then the focus will shift to the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN which will start operating in 2005. Other areas of discussion in this book is the extended model of the Standard Theory like supersymmetric standard theory, CP violation, dark matter, baryon asymmetry etc...

Also recommended is John Gribbin's - "Q is for Quantum - an encyclopedia of particle physics", which will definitely prove to be an invaluable source for anything and everything you wanted to know about particle physics.

The book is a bit dated(1996) and lacks charts and particle interactions equations which, I think, should have been provided appropriately to help the readers get a more better grasp on the subject and make it a more enjoyable learning experience. Apart from this grievance, Kane does a pretty good job of teaching and explaining the wonderful and complex world of particle physics.