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Very good in Good jacket. x, 341, [1] pages. Illustrations (some in color). Further Reading. References. Index. DJ has creased front and back flaps, and some wear and soiling. Black mark on bottom edge. Some page wear. Sean Michael Carroll (born 5 October 1966) is a cosmologist and Physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity. He is a research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals and magazines such as Nature, The New York Times, Sky & Telescope, and New Scientist. He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time, and the Higgs boson. He is also the author of three popular books: one on the arrow of time entitled From Eternity to Here, one on the Higgs boson entitled The Particle at the End of the Universe, and one on science and philosophy entitled The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory, first suspected to exist in the 1960s. Unlike other known fields such as the electromagnetic field, it takes a non-zero constant value almost everywhere. The question of the Higgs field's existence has been the last unverified part of the Standard Model of particle physics and, according to some, "the central problem in particle physics". The presence of this field, now believed to be confirmed, explains why some fundamental particles have mass when, based on the symmetries controlling their interactions, they should be massless. The existence of the Higgs field would also resolve several other long-standing puzzles, such as the reason for the weak force's extremely short range. Although it is hypothesized that the Higgs field permeates the entire Universe, evidence for its existence has been very difficult to obtain. The importance of this fundamental question led to a 40 year search, and the construction of one of the world's most expensive and complex experimental facilities to date, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, in an attempt to create Higgs bosons and other particles for observation and study. On 4 July 2012, the discovery of a new particle with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c2 was announced; physicists suspected that it was the Higgs boson. Since then, the particle has been shown to behave, interact, and decay in many of the ways predicted by the Standard Model. It was also tentatively confirmed to have even parity and zero spin, two fundamental attributes of a Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs, one of six physicists who, in 1964, proposed the mechanism that suggested the existence of such a particle. On December 10, 2013, two of them, Peter Higgs and François Englert, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work and prediction (Englert's co-researcher Robert Brout had died in 2011 and the Nobel Prize is not ordinarily given posthumously). In mainstream media the Higgs boson has often been called the "God particle", from a 1993 book on the topic. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson with no spin, electric charge, or color charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.