Elusive by Frank Close

Elusive by Frank Close

*A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Selection*



The first major biography of Peter Higgs, revealing how a short burst of work changed modern physics 

On July 4, 2012, the announcement came that one of the longest-running mysteries in physics had been solved: the Higgs boson, the missing piece in understanding why particles have mass, had finally been discovered. On the rostrum, surrounded by jostling physicists and media, was the particle's retiring namesake--the only person in history to have an existing single particle named for them. Why Peter Higgs? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and others, Close illuminates how an unprolific man became one of the world's most famous scientists. Close finds that scientific competition between people, institutions, and states played as much of a role in making Higgs famous as Higgs's work did. 

A revelatory study of both a scientist and his era, Elusive will remake our understanding of modern physics. 

Frank Close is the author of 15 popular physics books, including Half-Life, a biography of Bruno Pontecorvo, Antimatter, The Infinity Problem, and Very Short Introductions to Nothing and Particle Physics, which won an award. He is a former Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN and a professor of physics at Oxford University. He received the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Award for science communication in 2014, and he is the only scientist to have won the Association of British Science Writers' Prize three times.