A Whirlwind History of the Universe and Mankind: From the Big Bang to the Higgs Boson

This book is an essential read for everyone who is curious about how we humans came to exist and interested in understanding the science and social evolution that enabled us to establish that a Big Bang actually happened. The text uniquely explains the transitions between the various evolutionary plateaus: from the universe’s beginning in the Big Bang, to the emergence of Homo sapiens, highlighting the Mediterranean civilizations of Greece and Rome, the European Renaissance, the English industrial revolution, and the early European science discoveries, particularly those in physics, to the American Manhattan Project and the subsequent development of the new field of high-energy particle physics. This entire route, which eventually culminated in the discovery of the mass-giving Higgs boson, is clearly articulated in this monumental but concise work.

Thomas Sanford received his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman in 1972. Following his graduation, he conducted high-energy physics experiments at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England, the CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) Laboratory in Switzerland, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, participating in the discovery of the charm quark. In 1982, he joined Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico as a senior member of technical staff, and became a distinguished member in 1991, where he engineered a break-through in the physics of Z-pinches, opening wire arrays as possible drivers for inertial confinement fusion. In 2000, he became a fellow of the American Physical Society and in 2005 was awarded the Hannes Alfven Prize by the European Physical Society. He is retired from the Sandia National Laboratories, and currently lives in Albuquerque.