A number of books for the educated layman have been written explaining the fundamental concepts of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This book is one of the very best. Prof. Han has taken a historical time-line approach to introducing the reader to the theory and experiment of quarks and leptons, and their force carrier particles gluons, and the weak gauge bosons. This book utilizes a superb combination of text, tables, and diagrams to illustrate the author's points. Han's book has two particularly well-written narratives. The first is his lucid discussion of the chromo or 'color charge' in hadron formation, and the second is a presentation of conservation or zero-sum attributes of particles in collision. All introductory works explain, for example, that a proton is two up and one down quark. Han goes beyond that to invoke the need for color neutrality of red, green, and blue. Zero-sum conservation is found in few other books at this level. Han uses simple accounting tables to keep track of electric, nucleonic, leptonic, color, and baryonic 'charge'. Using these simple concepts the fact that beta decay must produce not a neutrino, but an anti-neutrino makes perfect sense. Han restricts his purview to just the fundamentals of the Standard Model. Anti-matter is discussed, but there are no excursions into string theory, supersymmetry, or even the Higgs boson. The historical time-line essentially ends with the confirmation of the top quark in 1995 at Fermilab. Nonetheless, this book is lucid, well-written and often witty. It is an outstanding intro to particle physics for the non-physicist.

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