Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab

Anomaly! provides a very honest description of how large HEP collaborations work, what makes experimental physicists excited, and of the occasional interference between scientific goals and 'human factors' such as personal ambitions, career issues, personality clashes, the fear of being scooped. The author proves to be a highly skilled communicator of science to the general public, as already known to the readers of his blog 'Quantum Diaries Survivor'. - Il Nuovo Saggiatore

Dorigo has written a charming and irreverent description of how a successful, large, particle physics collider detector group functioned to make important discoveries - and to avoid mistakes. The approach is continuous anecdotes, and along the way the reader learns enough physics to grasp the outcomes. He also makes clear how physicists know well who should get credit for major contributions even in a large detector group. - Gordon Kane, Author of Supersymmetry and Beyond, 2013

Elementary particles don't have ambitions or emotions, but the people who study them surely do. In Anomaly!, Tommaso Dorigo takes you on an expert-guided journey into both the massive machines that discover the building blocks of nature, and the egos and ids of the scientists behind them. An entertaining and provocative view into what life is really like on the cutting edge of physics. - Sean Carroll, author of The Particle at the End of the Universe, 2012

A captivating narrative that makes you feel the excitement of an experiment on the verge of a fundamental physics discovery. - Gianfrancesco Giudice, author of A Zeptospace Odyssey, 2009

From the mid-1980s, an international collaboration of 600 physicists embarked on the investigation of subnuclear physics at the high-energy frontier. As well as discovering the top quark, the heaviest elementary particle ever observed, the physicists analyzed their data to seek signals of new physics which could revolutionize our understanding of nature.

Anomaly! tells the story of that quest, and focuses specifically on the finding of several unexplained effects which were unearthed in the process. These anomalies proved highly controversial within the large team: to some collaborators they called for immediate publication, while to others their divulgation threatened to jeopardize the reputation of the experiment.

Written in a confidential, narrative style, this book looks at the sociology of a large scientific collaboration, providing insight in the relationships between top physicists at the turn of the millennium. The stories offer an insider's view of the life cycle of the ""failed"" discoveries that unavoidably accompany even the greatest endeavors in modern particle physics.