The Particles: A review

MAR 12, 2013

A new app aims to guide users through the rich, diverse, and sometimes confusing world of subatomic particles.

David Harris

The Particles is an attractive app for the iPad, Windows 8, and Microsoft Surface. It’s released by the Science Photo Library, with text written by Frank Close, Michael Marten, and Christine Sutton. The design is slick and modern, although some graphic elements appear primarily cosmetic and don’t have the deeper meaning that they imply. The typography is also a little more challenging to read than necessary.

The designers chose to present the particle world as consisting of five families: quarks, leptons, bosons, mesons, and baryons. The mixing of the fundamental and composite is explained only in a paragraph buried in the introduction, itself accessible only after discovering it in a menu. That decision constitutes my main complaint with the application: Where is a beginner to find the context necessary to put the rest in its place? The introduction (long, but well-written) is essential reading for anybody who doesn’t already know a bit about particle physics, but the app’s interface makes it hard to realize the importance of that piece of text.

The material itself is comprehensive and the A–Z of Particle Physics contains many of the lesser-known experiments and names relevant to particle physics. Of course, it would be easy to pick out omissions—any such list has them—but overall it seems quite complete. A little humor even makes a welcome appearance. See, for instance, the entry for Einstein.

Einstein, Albert (1879–1955). Are you seriously looking this up? He is very special. A general description merits an entire book, of which there are hundreds. Answer to a Trivial Pursuit question: he did not win the Nobel Prize for relativity theory.

However, you’ll find the entries all grounded in observation, with very little attention given to unconfirmed or exotic particles or phenomena. There is no dark matter, for example, in the listings, and all the information about supersymmetry is contained in a brief, seven-line listing. I suspect that the main users of an app like The Particles would probably enjoy the addition of the exotica now driving the future of particle physics.

The photos and illustrations, a main strength of the app, are comprehensive without replicating the standard images we have all grown tired of seeing. The Science Photo Library’s holdings are put to good use here. There are many event displays, and while this might overwhelm the uninitiated, most of the captions helpfully explain what the displays show. It’s a pity, however, that a general introduction to event displays wasn’t made part of this contextualization of information.

The text is well written, as I would expect from the authors, but suffers from a common problem of collections in general: how to walk the line between accessible and comprehensive? There is enough technical information that it could be daunting for a beginner to navigate, but not necessarily enough to satisfy an expert. It fits somewhere between an undergraduate textbook and the Particle Data Group’s Review of Particle Physics .

That intermediate position leads to the question of audience. Who is this app designed for? It seems that the best audience for this app is graduates with a physics degree who heard a bit about particle physics but want to know more, a beginning graduate student who wanted to quickly look up many of the basics of particle physics, or a fan of physics who has read some but not enough of the numerous popular books on particle physics to have mastered the terminology.

The Particles for the iPad, Windows 8, and Microsoft Surface is available for £4.99, US$7.99, and €5.99.

David Harris is the magazine section editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From 2004 to 2011 he served as the founding editor-in-chief of Symmetry, a magazine devoted to popularizing particle physics.