Present at the creation / Amir Aczel

Present at the Creation : the story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider by Amir Aczel. 271 p.

This ended up being more about physics and less about CERN than I'd have liked. Of course I expected some physics--it's hard to discuss the search for the Higgs boson without explaining what it is and why it's important--but I was hoping for more details about CERN and its history. (The physics explanations are pretty clear, though.) On the other hand, if you want a pretty thorough explanation of how the LHC is constructed, along with diagrams, you'll get that here. I also found some things about the author's writing style rather annoying. For instance, he uses the term "non-Abelian" and says that it "refers to Niels Henrik Abel." Well, no--it's named after Niels Henrik Abel, but it refers to the non-commutativity of the group.

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