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Fermilab: Physics, The Frontier and Megascience, by L. Hoddeson, A. Kolb and C. Westfall

At the time of writing, the Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory remains the world’s highest energy particle collider. As such, it is able to host experiments that explore and search for new phenomena in particle physics, and there are still active hopes that Fermilab may observe signs of the postulated Higgs particle before this is achieved at CERN in Geneva. Fermilab is located some 50 km west of Chicago, and has been the flagship laboratory for particle physics in the USA since its start of operations in 1972. The present volume presents a detailed account of the history and achievements of Fermilab during the first two decades of its activity. The authors are active in the history of science and one, who is married to a prominent Fermilab theoretical physicist, is the Fermilab Archivist. They are therefore very well qualified to write a history of the laboratory describing its hopes, disappointments, successes, failures, politics, personalities and physics achievements during the period that they have chosen to cover. This is really a very nicely written book, combining a professional historian’s eye for detail with an excellent narrative style. A pleasure to read, it will be accessible to non-physicists and physicists alike, since the necessary physics is explained in a fairly painless way and I could not find a single mathematical equation! An appropriate selection of black-and-white illustrations brings the text further to life, including a variety of historically significant photographs of people, places and occasions. For certain, this will be the definitive history of the first period of Fermilab’s existence. It is not, however, a physics textbook, and for a full account of the physics of elementary particles the reader must look elsewhere. We are taken through the initial plans for the laboratory, its founding, the first experiments and the main physics results achieved up until the discovery of the top quark in 1995. This is doubtless the highest peak in Fermilab’s record of successes so far. Human touches abound and the reader can gain some real insights into how physicists do physics. There is also a very informative account of the story of the ‘Superconducting Super Collider’ – the world-beating accelerator in Texas that never was, since the Clinton administration cancelled the expensive project in 1993. It is this cancellation that will soon enable Europe to regain the lead in world particle physics when the LHC at CERN finally starts its operations. A quibble, but a non-trivial one: the authors consistently quote ‘CDF’ as standing for ‘Colliding Detector at Fermilab’, a name that this major experiment never used. I am informed by one of the founder members that the name started in 1978 as ‘Colliding Detector Facility’, then changed to ‘Collider Detector Facility’ in 1981, and finally to ‘Collider Detector at Fermilab’. This should have been checked more thoroughly, and I hope there are not too many other hidden lacunae. Mymain disappointment, however, was that the story comes to an ill-defined end in 1995, without any very clear indication that after this the Tevatron and its experiments were refurbished, and high energy proton–antiproton collisions recommenced in 2001. The operations have continued very successfully to this day. No doubt there will eventually be a second companion volume, but a more informative outline of the laboratory’s later history would have been welcome as epilogue material, rather than the cursory list that we are given of the future plans in 1995. In any case, this volume is a compulsory purchase for physics libraries, and is thoroughly recommended for all who are interested in the history of particle physics. It would make a very good birthday present for a physicist!