Engines of Discovery: A Century of Particle Accelerators , Andrew Sessler and Edmund Wilson , World Scientific, Hackensack, NJ, 2007. $65.00, $37.00 paper (194 pp.). ISBN 978-981-270-070-4, ISBN 978-981-270-071-1 paper
“His love for physics was legendary and infectious.” That is how Andrew Sessler and Edmund Wilson describe Donald W. Kerst, one of many characters who appear in their Engines of Discovery: A Century of Particle Accelerators , a romance on the particle-accelerator saga. The sentence can be applied to the major and minor characters in the book, and to the authors themselves. Such description is what comes out of this beautifully illustrated and written history of particle accelerators. It is a book about physics that has no equations, one in which the story of the motivations for technological progress are entangled with the lives of the people who have witnessed the building, brick by brick, of particle accelerators—from the first electrostatic accelerator to the ambitious Large Hadron Collider. Those bricks have been gigantic and small, yet all have been essential parts of an endeavor that has in the past century strongly influenced human progress.
Any other book on particle-accelerator history would have included the two authors because of their influence on US and European accelerator development. Sessler is a former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Wilson, a visiting professor at Oxford University, led the commissioning of the Super Proton Synchrotron and once headed the CERN Accelerator School. The need for higher-energy beams for fundamental research has been the major motivation for advances in particle accelerators. The idea of an accelerator was first discussed publically in 1928 when Ernest Rutherford, during his presidential address to the Royal Society of London, asked for a beam of charged particles more energetic than those produced by natural radioactivity. John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton picked up the challenge; in the Cavendish Laboratory, they invented the high-voltage generator that is named after them. Eighty years later the new generation of high-energy accelerators is being made possible with the participation of research groups from numerous laboratories and funds from all over the world. The complexity of the machines has allowed researchers to increase the energy of the particles by orders of magnitude.
Researchers’ intellectual curiosity for fundamental physics laws has generated technical progress on a range of accelerator applications—from synchrotron radiation to cancer therapy to spallation neutron sources. The flexibility of the community of accelerator physicists is evident in its ability to apply the most innovative physics for a collider to the most reliable technology for a medical application. The authors show the path from fundamental physics to technology to application in the book’s 11 chapters, each of which discusses a different type of particle accelerator. Each chapter provides a self-contained description of its particular device and follows an approximate chronological order, which allows readers to keep track of advances. The past, the present, and some hints of the future are described with scientific yet literary language.
Sidebars are dedicated not only to the people who made particle-accelerator history but also to some of the laboratories where they worked, suffered, and celebrated together in the pursuit of scientific progress. Sessler and Wilson mention the protagonists’ joy for life, their interests besides physics, and their love for music, sports, and literature; thus the authors add brushstrokes of humanity to the historical panorama. Many of the book’s subjects have been awarded national and international honors, including the Nobel Prize. Some of their achievements have received generous recognition; the contributions of others who have not been acknowledged find, in Sessler and Wilson’s book, their place in the chronology. The book also honors projects that were unsuccessful because of economical, physical, or political reasons but were a step forward in the pursuit of knowledge.
For researchers working with particle accelerators, the book represents a family history. Many of us will find in its pages our teachers, friends, and colleagues, and the laboratories where we started our careers or lived our adventures in this fascinating field of particle-accelerator physics. Younger readers who are familiar with accelerator types and devices will come to know the scientists who long ago had the strength and courage to transform their ideas into reality. Thanks to the fresh and pleasant language that Sessler and Wilson use, Engines of Discovery should appeal to anybody interested in the history of scientific progress. The authors dedicate a special section to young people, encouraging them to join the teams for which particle-accelerator research is alive and challenging. With this book, the authors ensure that the enthusiasm that has led so many people to dedicate their lives to this branch of physics will continue to grow.
