Particle accelerators: from Big Bang physics to hadron therapy

The theoretical physicist Victor “Viki” Weisskopf, Director-General of CERN from 1961 to 1965, once “There are three kinds of physicists, namely the machine builders, the experimental physicists, and the theoretical physicists. […] The machine builders are the most important ones, because if they were not there, we would not get into this small-scale region of space. If we compare this with the discovery of America, the machine builders correspond to captains and ship builders who really developed the techniques at that time. The experimentalists were those fellows on the ships who sailed to the other side of the world and then landed on the new islands and wrote down what they saw. The theoretical physicists are those who stayed behind in Madrid and told Columbus that he was going to land in India.” Rather than focusing on the theoretical physicists, as most popular science books on particle physics do, this beautifully written and also entertaining book is different in that, firstly, the main focus is on machine inventors and builders and, secondly, particle accelerators are not only described as discovery tools but also concerning their contribution to tumor diagnosis and therapy. The characters of well-known (e.g. Ernest Lawrence) and mostly unknown actors (e.g. Nicholas Christofilos) are outlined, including many colorful quotations. The last two chapters describe the use of accelerators in medicine and, to complete the picture, the Epilogue reviews the post-Higgs description of the beginnings of the Universe. The overall picture supports the author’s motto: “Physics is beautiful and useful”.