The Infinity Puzzle

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a scientific gold rush, as physicists raced to chart the inner workings of the atom. While many of its mysteries came unraveled, one remained intractable - what Frank Close calls the "Infinity Puzzle." Although quantum field theory offered a powerfu [...]
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The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a scientific gold rush, as physicists raced to chart the inner workings of the atom. While many of its mysteries came unraveled, one remained intractable - what Frank Close calls the "Infinity Puzzle." Although quantum field theory offered a powerful explanatory framework for elementary particle physics, it nonetheless made one utterly ridiculous prediction: that certain events had an infinite probability of occurring. In The Infinity Puzzle, acclaimed theoretical physicist Frank Close covers half a century of particle physics and explains how scientists have reached the solution, known as renormalization, which enables theory to match what we see in the real world. An influential approach, renormalization has conquered three of the four fundamental forces of nature, and has given rise to the concept of the Higgs boson, the much-sought particle that may be what gives structure to the universe. With a physicist's expertise and a historian's care, Close describes the personalities and competition, the dead ends and the sudden insights, in a story for the pursuit of an orderly universe that will reverberate through the ages.