Book Review: Grace in All Simplicity: Beauty, Truth, and Wonders on the Path to the Higgs Boson and New Laws of Nature by Chris Quigg and Robert N. Cahn

This review was first published by Booklist on September 1, 2023.

Grace in All Simplicity traces the development of our current, standard model of physics from the earliest days of atomic theory to the development of particle physics to challenges of dark matter and energy. Cahn and Quigg highlight the many people who contributed to this history, alongside the technology that made it possible and the experiments that revolutionized our understanding of the universe. This isn’t a chronological account. By bouncing around the time line, they highlight the connectedness of the underlying concepts and the ways experiment and theory interact over time. There’s equal attention paid to theory, experiment, and technology. All are necessary to build our best scientific understandings. Theory requires experiment, technology enables new experiments, and experiments deliver results which require new theory. It’s all connected. While there’s no math, the content is very dense, chock-full of concepts and names of people and particles. Because this isn’t a chronological account, the dates can get muddled, but the payoff is a wonderful and engaging dive into the last century of revolutionary physics.