Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am a working physicist, 30 years past my Ph. D., and I picked up this book thinking it would be interesting to learn about progress in particle physics and cosmology. I was very disappointed. The meat of the book is Chapters 16 and 17, where Prof. Randall finally gets to describing the theory behind the Higgs boson and other anticipated discoveries from the LHC. These are so poorly written it seems like her editor just figured, "no one will understand this, so why bother trying to make it readable." The sentence structure is convoluted to the point that, even with multiple readings, it's impossible to tell the point she's trying to make. She throws around terms like "weak charge" without ever bothering to explain whether this quantity is a weak version of the electric charge or an analogy of electric charge that conveys the weak force. She frequently makes reference to the Planck length, without ever saying what it is, where it comes from, or how to translate between distance and energy, which she uses interchangeably. This weakness is illustrated by her explanation of the possible applicability of extra dimensions to explain the 16 orders-of-magnitude difference between gravity and the weak force, one of the few contributions she takes personal credit for. You could just say, "the forces are of different strengths" and leave it at that. Randall says, in essence, "Imagine gravity is 10^16 times stronger on another brane in another dimension, but that dimension is coupled to our world by an arbitrary coupling constant of 10^-16." This adds nothing of intellectual value to the field, but the buzzwords have been used, so it's time to schedule a book tour and let the accolades roll in. Now, of course, there may be some actual content to her brane theory, but, my point is, you won't find it in the book, which is, therefore, a waste of time. The balance of the book is devoted to a description of the design of the LHC (which, as near as I can tell, is nothing more than a yet-bigger and more expensive synchrotron, an accelerator that hasn't had its fundamental design changed in 60 years) and a travelogue of her VIP tours of various physics sites and parties. I learned a lot more from "The 4 percent universe: dark matter, dark energy, and the race to discover the rest of reality" by Richard Panek. He focuses only on cosmology, but does a reasonable job making his material clear. Skip it.