Alex Forcier

I recently published my book, The Higgs Boson for Bozos: A Peek Inside the Science of the Higgs Particle, on the Kindle store.

Its purpose to help people understand the main ideas behind the Higgs boson: why its existence is important to the Standard Model of particle physics, how physicists went about looking for it and how they interpret the results of their experiments. I try to describe things as simply as possible without being misleading.

Up until a year or so ago, I hadn’t planned on writing a book on the Higgs boson. Though my field of study in physics is theoretical high energy physics, the Higgs boson and the search for it were not my main focus. What led to my writing this book were all the questions I was asked by friends and acquaintances regarding the Higgs. Non-physicist friends would read about it or see something on the news and think ‘I know someone who can explain this to me!’ I got a lot of discerning questions. Often people would have looked into the subject by reading Wikipedia, and would ask me questions like “I sort of get what it’s supposed to do, but how much of our current understanding depends on it existing?” or “Do you think they’ll find it? – What if they do? And what if they don’t?”.

I thought I would take a shot at putting together a reasonably short primer on the Higgs boson. Other books existed that were focused on the Standard Model as a whole: they would take you through the origins of the Standard Model, with profiles of all the people who contributed to it, and towards the end introduce the idea of the Higgs mechanism in a “what next?” context. I thought I would focus on the Higgs boson itself, introducing only the necessary background information. I wanted to create something a smart and interested person can understand, something that answered questions not addressed in other books or sources.