Scientific Publishing Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab

Review In this book, Tommaso Dorigo gives the reader a fascinating look at experimental elementary particle physics from the inside, showing the warts as well as the triumphs. Unusually for such a book, he focuses not just on the discoveries and the milestone measurements, but also on the would-be discoveries that did not pan out the apparent departures from the Standard Model of particle physics that turned out to result from statistical fluctuations or imprecise modeling. The reader will come away with a new appreciation for the challenges of doing high energy experimental physics and getting it right. --Edward Witten, 1990 Fields Medallist, Princeton UniversityTommaso Dorigo's Anomaly! is itself an anomaly amidst popular science books, giving an unusually lively and clear-eyed inside look at how physics is done at the large particle collider collaborations. The physics results from the Tevatron collider have now entered the textbooks, but the very human story of the suspenseful twists and turns behind them has never before been told. If you're even slightly interested in how particle physics is really done, this is your chance to find out. Dorigo is a talented and irreverent scientist, but at the same time a compelling and entertaining writer, and Anomaly! brings the recent history of high energy physics to life. --Peter Woit, Author of Not Even Wrong, 2006What makes Anomaly! unique is the sense of what research is like within a collaboration determined to make history. There have been other accounts of discovery in particle physics experiments … But none has captured the boom-and-bust cycle of collaborative frontier science quite so well and quite so entertainingly as Dorigo. His lively tour of the false discoveries and crushed ambitions, the outrageous hope, hard work and intense focus is a guilty pleasure in the very best sense. --Times Higher Education Product Description ReviewsElementary particles don't have ambitions or emotions, but the people who study them surely do. In Anomaly!, Tommaso Dorigo takes you on an expert-guided journey into both the massive machines that discover the building blocks of nature, and the egos and ids of the scientists behind them. An entertaining and provocative view into what life is really like on the cutting edge of physics. -- Sean Carroll, author of The Particle at the End of the Universe, 2012A captivating narrative that makes you feel the excitement of an experiment on the verge of a fundamental physics discovery. -- Gianfrancesco Giudice, author of A Zeptospace Odyssey, 2009Dorigo provides an engaging and insightful perspective on the pursuit of physics discoveries at CDF...Dorigo's book is thus almost certainly going to be an important source for anyone interested in the history of CDF...It is a personal yet highly informative story of discovery and almost-discovery from the perspective of someone who saw the events firsthand. -- Physics TodayFrom the mid-1980s, an international collaboration of 600 physicists embarked on the investigation of subnuclear physics at the high-energy frontier. As well as discovering the top quark, the heaviest elementary particle ever observed, the physicists analyzed their data to seek signals of new physics which could revolutionize our understanding of nature.Anomaly! tells the story of that quest, and focuses specifically on the finding of several unexplained effects which were unearthed in the process. These anomalies proved highly controversial within the large team: to some collaborators they called for immediate publication, while to others their divulgation threatened to jeopardize the reputation of the experiment.Written in a confidential, narrative style, this book looks at the sociology of a large scientific collaboration, providing insight in the relationships between top physicists at the turn of the millennium. The stories offer an insider's view of the life cycle of the "failed" discoveries that unavoidably accompany e