John W. Moffat has been a professor of physics for more than three decades. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, a member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and adjunct professor in the physics department at the University of Waterloo. Moffat is well known for his alternative theory of gravity to Einstein's general relativity. He is the author of Reinventing Gravity: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein and Einstein Wrote Back: My Life in Physics.
John Moffat's book is an unusual mixture of scientific writing, detective story, and romance. It takes us on a very personal quest of understanding the nature of the new particle discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, highlighting the drama leading to this major discovery and the author's own alternative theoretical views challenged by the ATLAS and CMS experiment data. The author cleverly mixes scientific sections with a day-to-day account of the events that led to the discovery of the Higgs Boson and its aftermath. This is delightful reading for anyone interested in big science and theoretical ideas that led to the development of the standard model of particle physics. It is a passionate personal account of one of the most significant discoveries in particle physics of the past few decades. --Greg Landsberg, Brown University, CMS Physics Coordinator 2012-2013 John Moffat has written a fascinating insider's account of the international struggle of theoretical and experimental physicists to understand the origin of mass, and to develop a simple unified theory of fundamental forces. Unlike most popular books, which focus on just the leading theory, Cracking the Particle Code describes how a plethora of competing ideas arose over the last five decades and how a combination of intuition, mathematical reasoning, and extraordinary technology is being applied to decide the issue. --Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Princeton University There are many books on the market that describe the Higgs boson discovery. This book's uniqueness is its author's uncompromising drive to question both theory and experiment. --London Times Higher Education For a picture of the global nature and excitement of the Higgs discovery, we turn to Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe. Moffat does not hold back on his engagement. --Physics Today Moffat's new book is a well-done and well-written survey of the history, achievements, and shortcomings of the Standard Model of particle physics. It will equip the reader with all the necessary knowledge to put into context the coming headlines about new discoveries at the LHC and future colliders. --Physics World