"I will give you my priority: to be first and to be correct is the most important. To be first but to be wrong I think is not as good." -- Sam Ting
I'll confess that my "education" on this topic is limited due to having only read this one book, but it was still pretty enlightening, even if some critics call it somewhat flawed.
The book, which I still have, is titled Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment (1986/1987). In it the author, Gary Taubes, gives account of the race to discover the W and Z bosons at CERN, research that resulted in a shared 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics between Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer.
[EdNote: A boson is a type of subatomic particle that has an integer spin (0, 1, 2) and acts as a force carrier in the universe.]
The book focuses on Rubbia, the Italian experimental physicist who pushed CERN to convert its Super Proton Synchrotron into a proton–antiproton collider and who led the UA1 collaboration that detected the particles. Those bosons carry the weak nuclear force and finding them confirmed the electroweak theory that unifies the weak force with electromagnetism. Van der Meer’s contribution was the stochastic cooling technique that made it possible to accumulate enough antiprotons for the collisions to succeed.
Taubes spent months at CERN interviewing physicists. In the book he explains the accelerator physics and detector work clearly enough for a general reader while spending most of his attention on the people.
What set the book apart, and made it controversial, is the portrait of Rubbia. Taubes presents him as brilliant, relentless, and often abrasive: skilled at politics and fundraising, willing to drive a large international team hard, and, in Taubes’s narrative, prone to overstating or rushing results.
The book follows both the successful W and Z discoveries and later, less successful claims—including an early top-quark announcement and “monojet” events that Rubbia suggested might point to new physics—that did not hold up.
Contemporary reviews in the Los Angeles Times and Time described the book as unusually good at showing big science as a human enterprise of ambition, rivalry, and luck, not only as a search for particles. Rubbia, however, called much of it rubbish, or more accurately, "Terrible," and that Taubes had not understood how discovery works in large collaborations. Some colleagues defended Rubbias integrity while still acknowledging the force of his overbearing personality.
As for me the biggest takeaway was how competitive things get when a Nobel Prize is at stake. And the amount of money involved. Carlo Rubbia’s role was to conceive the project, force it through CERN, and run the UA1 detector collaboration that claimed the signals. The 1984 Nobel was for that work, and hundreds of people were involved. The prize was not for a mad scientist holed up in his laboratory beneath the clock tower.
The book is now dated in its physics—the top quark and Higgs boson came later—but it remains a sharp early example of investigative science writing about how Nobel-level experimental particle physics is actually done: huge machines, large collaborations, and careers shaped as much by persuasion and competition as by data.
TRIVIA: Alfred Nobel, for whom the prizes are name, made his fortune from explosives patents and the companies that manufactured them. At his death in 1896 he had 355 patents and a large international industrial estate. That estate continues to fund the Nobel Prizes.
