Sit laus vobis qui loculum antiqui cordis in fonte aspicitis. So praise to you who gaze into the fount, the source, the ancient heart’s little chamber ... (Hildegard of Bingen, ‘O vos angeli’)
‘Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the secret to success’ – Savas Dimopoulos, CERN physicist.
In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded. – Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies.
How do we know that what we call knowledge is knowledge? How do we know that we know? Dare we ask why? Mother Basil Cooney, Brigidine nun and kindest of my schoolteachers, told me half a century ago that science doesn’t ask ‘why’ – science asks ‘how’. So no, for the purposes of this review, I won’t be asking why.
The two books I have been reading here are both about kinds of knowing. Suzie Sheehy is a particle physicist from my old stamping ground, Melbourne University (although as a Pure English student, my only connection with science there was somewhat indirect, a proxy if you like, through a couple of blokes of the scientific persuasion). Sheehy’s story is of passionate hunters for nothing less than the meaning of everything. Her interest began with an experience of deep connectedness as a student at Victoria’s Leon Mow Dark Sky site when she saw the Milky Way:
The most spectacular view was the bright band of stars and dust, the glowing arc of our own galaxy, the Milky Way … That moment was when I truly grasped how small I was, how short-lived … The stars and planets weren’t up there and I wasn’t down here: it was all part of one enormous physical system called the Universe.
The matter of everything is structured around twelve physics experiments that changed the human world, not merely through understanding, but in the history-changing ramifications of the discoveries. Sheehy’s enthusiasm draws us as she explains the history of particle physics’ Standard Model, from the first cracks it made in the armour of Classical Physics in 1895 when Wilhelm Röntgen noticed a weird persistence of light in a turned-off cathode ray screen. This led to X-rays, and other discoveries led to radar, computers, carbon dating, forensics, nuclear medicine, nuclear power – and nuclear bombs. And then the Higgs boson.
One of the most entrancing things I took from her book is that Nature spins. In particle physics, there are unimaginably tiny thingies made of photons and muons and