ldquoA vivid account of what the process of discovery was really like for an insiderrdquomdashPeter HiggsldquoButterworth is an insiderrsquos insider His narrative seethes with insights on the projectrsquos science technology and lsquotribesrsquo as well as his personal and often amusing journey as a frontier physicistrdquomdashNature The discovery of the Higgs boson has brought us a giant step closer to understanding how our universe works But before the Higgs was found its existence was hotly debated Even Peter Higgs who first pictured it did not expect to see proof within his lifetime The quest to find the Higgs would ultimately require perhaps the most ambitious experiment in human history Jon Butterworth was theremdasha leading physicist on the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland In Most Wanted Particle he gives us the first insider account of the hunt for the Higgs and of life at the collider itselfmdashthe worldrsquos largest and most powerful particle accelerator miles long stories underground and designed to ldquoreplayrdquo the original Big Bang by smashing subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light Writing with clarity and humor Butterworth revels as much in the hard sciencemdashwhich he carefully reconstructs for readers of all levelsmdashas in the messiness uncertainty and humanness of sciencemdashfrom the media scrutiny and late-night pub debates to the false starts and intense pressure to generate results He captures a moment when an entire field hinged on the proof or disproof of a -year-old theorymdashand even sciencersquos top minds didnrsquot know what to expect Finally he explains why physics will never be the same after our first glimpse of the elusive Higgsmdashand where it will go from here.
