Particle Physics Brick by Brick Paperback

The book came today and I quickly discovered it's a great book for an adult who knows nothing about the subject and even a greater book for a grade school child who loves legos and one who you want to interest in particle physics the building blocks of our universe. So I shall gift this book to my 9 year old granddaughter who spends hours building with legos and I shall buy another copy for myself so I can follow along with her.

The particle zoo is extremely tedious, but Still livens it up with great graphics careful analysis. The lego spin does not work very well, but it is a decent setting for the graphics.

I bought this book to learn more basic components of matter. It has served that purpose. As an absolute newbie to the concepts, I find it both funny and absurd that others write poor reviews on mistakes made in the book on such details as percentages of charges, etc. This book is designed for people like myself who just want a basic idea. It does this well. If you already understand the concepts you should be reading a more advanced book anyway. Thank you, author. You taught me some things.

Book isn’t in good condition when I ordered a new one. But still readable

This, aside from Lego instructions, is a good basic explaination for nuclear physics for non physics people.

If you’re looking for anything in particle physics — buy this one! This is a hidden gem!

Not for you.Only for scientist.

This book is truly for the entry level, and doesn't quite hit that mark either. I think both someone seeking a good basic grounding in the subject would be disappointed, as would also anyone already having a grasp on it, but hoping for some additional illumination. When I bought the book I thought the 'lego' approach might be useful, but no, it is more useless. It only gets in the way of trying to illustrate particles, and ultimately confuses things more than helping. There is no real foundation laid for the supposed gist of the book, i..e PARTICLES. For example, there is WAY too much space taken up for the birth and collapse of stars and their effect on particles and elements. Nice idea, but such simplistic visuals just dont cut it, and the books also does not give a good grounding in it's small amount of text either.

Let me say first of all that I think the general idea behind this book is a good one and I do like the way the book has been laid out. It's the errors and inconsistencies that let it down. Firstly, we are given a lego brick key to fermions and bosons on page 9; e.g. up, down, charm and strange particles are given colour and brick size codes, e.g. up is red, down is purple. Then on page 17 a neutron is built up from a red brick (up quark) and a purple brick (down quark) plus a green brick (representing another down quark) - where did the green brick come from? According to the key it should be a purple brick. Other reviewers have pointed out similar inconsistencies. I think I understand why this has been done, but why doesn't the key on page 9 allow for a down quark to be purple or green, or state that the colour of a brick is not important? What exasperates this problem even more is that on page 17 the brick structure representing the proton is wrong. Protons are made up of 2 up quarks and a down quark, whereas the diagram on page 17 shows a proton made up of 2 down quarks and an up quark, which is a neutron! On page 24 the proton and neutron structures are correct, but again the colour coding is inconsistent. On page 40 up quarks are represented by red, green and purple bricks! By this time in the book you begin to realise that the colour of the bricks is not very meaningful. Why isn't that pointed out in the beginning? Once you understand that, the rest of the book is easier to assimilate.

Clearly, there will be some limitations when reducing particle physics to Lego bricks but, it would seem, surprisingly few. I have found this book really helpful. I have been tinkering in the margins of quantum physics and necessarily, therefore, particle physics for some time now; this book brings together the particle bit extremely well. It explains the physics very well without the complex maths and brings all the little bits into one handy reference - perfect for my little brain. I'm about a third of my way through it all and I've found "little sips" then time to savour better than big gulps; it is more of a textbook than a novel. I'm enjoying it more than I feel I should - am I turning into a geek? Highly recommended.

Lego, particle physics, cool pressie for my 10 year old nephew (with vague interest in science) - what can go wrong?Oooops, upon reading, pretty obvious my 10 year old nephew is going to have to wait 3-4 years before getting his teeth into this one, on the upside I kept it for myself! Well I needed a pressie for me.Cool!

This is a gem of a pop science book. It's beautifully illustrated and very eloquently explains the fundamentals of particle physics without hitting you over the head with quantum field theory and Lagrangian dynamics. The author has done an exceptional job. This is a must have for all students and academics of both physics and applied maths!

What an amazing and inspired book this is. While the Lego brick analogy has its limitations, Ben Still uses it to great effect to explain a subject that is not easily explained. The explanations are clear and concise, and easily digested. You don't need to buy any Lego bricks to understand the book but having some to hand does help.If you are a novice when ti comes to this subject matter then you could do a lot worse than this book to learn about it. Quantum physics has never been so much fun.