The Infinity Puzzle

Resumen del libro

Speculation is rife that by 2012 the elusive Higgs boson will be found at the Large Hadron Collider. If found, the Higgs boson would help explain why everything has mass. But there's more at stake-what we're really testing is our capacity to make the universe reasonable.
Our best understanding of physics is predicated on something known as quantum field theory. Unfortunately, in its raw form, it doesn't make sense-its outputs are physically impossible infinite percentages when they should be something simpler, like the number 1. The kind of physics that the Higgs boson represents seeks to "renormalize" field theory, forcing equations to provide answers that match what we see in the real world.

Biografía del autor

Frank Close (Gran Bretaña, 1945) es físico de partículas e investigador en el Centro de Física Teórica Rudolf Peierls de la Universidad de Oxford. Ha sido vicepresidente de la Sociedad Británica para el Avance de la Ciencia y jefe de la división de física teórica del Laboratorio Rutherford Appleton, así como jefe de comunicación y educación pública de la Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear (CERN). Es autor de diversos libros de divulgación científica, entre los que cabe destacar: Fin. La catástrofe cósmica y el destino del universo (1994), Lucifer's Legacy (2001) Nothing, a very short introduction (2007) y Antimatter (2009).