Quarks And Gluons: A Century Of Particle Charges

Good book! Well written!

A number of books for the educated layman have been written explaining the fundamental concepts of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This book is one of the very best. Prof. Han has taken a historical time-line approach to introducing the reader to the theory and experiment of quarks and leptons, and their force carrier particles gluons, and the weak gauge bosons. This book utilizes a superb combination of text, tables, and diagrams to illustrate the author's points. Han's book has two particularly well-written narratives. The first is his lucid discussion of the chromo or 'color charge' in hadron formation, and the second is a presentation of conservation or zero-sum attributes of particles in collision. All introductory works explain, for example, that a proton is two up and one down quark. Han goes beyond that to invoke the need for color neutrality of red, green, and blue. Zero-sum conservation is found in few other books at this level. Han uses simple accounting tables to keep track of electric, nucleonic, leptonic, color, and baryonic 'charge'. Using these simple concepts the fact that beta decay must produce not a neutrino, but an anti-neutrino makes perfect sense. Han restricts his purview to just the fundamentals of the Standard Model. Anti-matter is discussed, but there are no excursions into string theory, supersymmetry, or even the Higgs boson. The historical time-line essentially ends with the confirmation of the top quark in 1995 at Fermilab. Nonetheless, this book is lucid, well-written and often witty. It is an outstanding intro to particle physics for the non-physicist.

Over two rainy days, I posted up with some records and tackled this story of modern physics. It was a delightful experience! And my itch to grasp basic particle physics has been scratched. A good follow up is QED by Feynman, however it is not as much of a walk in the park as this book. Han has an amazing ability to take a highly complex topic and present it in a way so that it is not complicated, but not understated. Researchers and fanatics alike will find something useful in this beautfully bound book!

I've read several books on The Standard Model targeted for the layperson. I was hesitant when I saw this book thinking it was a bit short and that it might be too technical, considering the author is credited with introducing the SU(3) symmetry of quarks, i.e., the color charge. Instead what I found was the book I wish I had come across first: very clear language and little math to contend with; nice illustrations; very few and brief biographical detours (many books on the subject are more about the people than the physics); and a complete synopsis of all the fundamental particles and their associated forces/interactions and force carriers/mediators. If you do not have a strong background in science but are curious about the world of the very small, this is definitely the right book for you. I only wish Professor Moo-Young Han had written an entire series like this, covering each particle and force book by book.

This is a very interesting book in QP. The content is very well organized for someone with some physics background but want to know more about QP. I highly recommended this book to everyone interest in QP, but don't know where to start. Its also good for someone want to know more about Quarks.