Particle Hunters

In The Particle Hunters, the authors give a non-technical account of the fascinating story of the search for the fundamental building blocks of matter. Beginning with the experiments of Thompson and Rutherford at the turn of the century, the book chronicles how physicists revealed layer upon layer of structure within the atom, and concludes with an up-to-date description of recent discoveries, including the 'charmed', 'beauty' and 'truth' quarks, the psi and upsilon particles, the tau lepton and the W and Z intermediate vector bosons, the carriers of the weak force. All that is required of the reader is a knowledge of a few basic concepts, such as energy, mass and electric charge. This lucid and entertaining exposition of the search for the ultimate 'elementary' particles, co-authored by a scientist who himself was responsible for many of the major steps forward in the field, will interest anyone wishing to keep pace with the progress of human knowledge, from the scientifically educated general reader, through to the professional physicist.