Atom Land: A Guided Tour Through the Strange (and Impossibly Small) World of Particle Physics by Jon Butterworth. Butterworth is a lecture in particle physics at a layman's level. Butterworth is a physics professor at University College London and a member of the Atlas experiment at Cern's Large Hadron Collider. He studied Physics at the University of Oxford, gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in particle physics in 1992. His Ph.D. research used the ZEUS [...]

I am obliged to The Experiment (independent publisher) for providing me an Advance Reader Copy of the American edition through NetGalley.This is a wonderful book. I quickly grew tired of the travel metaphor that Prof. Butterworth uses, but shed that imagined weariness when he got into weak forces and by the end, was a wholehearted fan. I have not come across a better, layperson's explanation of particle physics than this book. No, it's not rigorously mathematically bound, nor is this a classroom [...]

Don't Worry About the "Whimsy"; This Is Top Drawer TeachingI was a bit leery about this title at first. I have a working knowledge of physics and a reasonably broad understanding of the fundamentals of quantum physics. But, more and deeper understanding is always better, and it's one thing to sort of understand what you're reading and quite another to truly comprehend what you just read or at least to extend your reach. So, this book looked interesting - except for the come on -- "Readers will s [...]

Atom Land was a joy to read.I’m not a scientist, astronomer, physicist, etal. Just have a curious mind. Atom Land does a good job of helping those who are afraid of the Math in Physics. Being able to explain complex issues with simple illustrations is a gift. Jon Butterworth’s sailing voyage hit the mark for me. We come from the west, the land of what we consider normal. Planets, moons, suns, galaxies. This is what we see and interact with. Mr Butterworth then brings us to our starting point [...]

This book by Jon Butterworth is a real treasure for those who like their intellectual feasts with the wine of humor. Butterworth uses the metaphor of a map to describe the world of experimental physics. He not only explains what we know but also and more importantly what we don't know. I think an alternate title should be "Here be dragons". Like the early map makers who drew dragons where they had no information here Butterworth goes one better, he envisions what it is like to be a scientist jou [...]

Note: I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley.I really enjoyed reading this book. As a student studying physics and mathematics, I approach popular science books with trepidation, since they can either gloss over too many details or overly romanticize the job of scientists. With that being said, I found this book to not suffer from these issues. Instead, the imagery was great and the book had a very nice flow to it. The chapters weren't too long, and they brushed on just enough detail to m [...]

A bit too much travel references, but other than that, the book is beautifully written.

Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote Flatland to help explore geometry, dimensions, and related topics (as well as a healthy dose of spiritual/social commentary); now Jon Butterworth does something similar for particle physics (hold the social commentary). He describes the most current theories of what atoms are made of and how all the bits, energies, forces, etc. act and interact in terms of places on a map and travel between those places (with plenty of humorous asides).The author does a good job of exp [...]

I thought A Map Of The Invisible was very good indeed. Jon Butterworth is both a fine physicist and a very engaging writer. The combination produces something rather special here.Butterworth's aim is to give the non-physicist an insight into the quantum world, from the basic structure of atoms to more recent developments like the discovery of the Higgs boson and also into more arcane theories and theoretical methods and the current directions of thinking in physics. He does this by an extended a [...]

Understanding particle physics through travel analogiesI enjoyed this book. There are lots of books on physics, but what sets this one apart is the liberal use of travel analogies to explain going from larger to smaller particles. I got the sense that author Jon Butterworth truly wanted me to understand the information and that created a writer-reader relationship. I can’t say that he was completely successful in getting me to understand, but he did create a fun-to-read book. And check out the [...]