For the past two years or so, I've been reading a steady diet of books of a certain genre. These books attempt to present relatively non-technical introductions to particle physics and related topics, for an educated lay audience. I recently finished reading a new book of this type, entitled The Theory of Almost Everything: The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics, by George Mason University professor Robert Oerter. Henceforth, I'll abbreviate the book's title as ToAE.
The Standard Model basically is an enumeration of the known matter and force particles (except for the gravitational force), and the interactions among these particles. This Fermilab document provides easy-to-read charts that summarize the matter particles, the force particles, and then the two together (near the bottom of the page).
To quote Oerter, the Standard Model is, in fact, no less than "...by far the most successful scientific theory ever" (p. 219).
More formally, the Standard Model can be depicted in the form of equations, a simplified version of which Oerter presents on page 207. Illustrating what I think is a gift Oerter has for providing clear explanations, he notes later on the same page that:
There are 18 adjustable numerical parameters in total in the Standard Model. Think of the Standard Model as a machine with 18 knobs. If we twiddle the knobs just right, the machine spits out nearly perfect predictions about any (nongravitational) process in the universe.
That, for me, is the major story of ToAE -- how Oerter illuminated several concepts I either had not been aware of or had not been able to figure out when reading about them in the past. These concepts include:
*How the format of the Periodic Table of the Elements (ubiquitously displayed in chemistry classrooms) derives from the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
*Murray Gell-Mann's "Eightfold Way" of organizing the immense number of particles that began to be discovered in the 1950s. I had read about the Eightfold Way numerous times, but it was not until Oerter's explanation that I finally grasped how this model could be depicted by a simple visual diagram.
*I've been aware of and understood (I believe) the concept of Asymptotic Freedom for some time. Until reading how Oerter put the relevant research into context, however, I did not have an appreciation for the scientific contribution made by Asymptotic Freedom (i.e., what crucial scientific question did it answer?).
Another area Oerter explains beautifully is the working of particle accelerators and colliders, and how physicists interpret the outputs of the collisions. I plan to address this issue separately in a future posting, given the expected 2007 opening of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, with which physicists hope to find evidence of various theorized particles and phenomena.
The book's title claims the Standard Model to be the theory of almost everything, so accordingly the latter sections of the book discuss areas unexplained by the Standard Model and the kind of research being done to address these gaps.
There were some areas that I thought could have been addressed at greater length, such as quantum entanglement, which is what I believe Oerter was getting at in his allusion to "long-distance correlations" (p. 91). Topics receiving less coverage than I might have wanted were few and far between, however.
In conclusion, I would definitely recommend The Theory of Almost Everything. One slight concern I have is that the breakthroughs in understanding I achieved from ToAE may be a result of reading it after several other books (most notably Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos), thus giving me a prior working knowledge of many of the things Oerter talked about. If ToAE is the first physics book you ever read, you may (or may not) get the same benefit I got, but Oerter's down-to-earth explanations should take you a long way.