Nobel Dreams is an account of some big discoveries in elementary particle physics. The book is enlightening about Carlo Rubbia, the brilliant, difficult personality heading the team engaged in much of the research described, and the portrait of the Nobel Prize winner probably is a fair one. The description of how the particle collider works is clear and the more easily understood physics is presented well. But overall, I was dissatisfied. The narrative drive present at the beginning dissipated during the book’s second half, an extended anticlimax that drained my interest.

On the gossipy side, author Gary Taubes recounts rivalries and interpersonal conflicts arising among these highly motivated, talented, and prideful physicists, i.e. the dramas of prima donnas who indulge, as one says, in “intellectual exhibitionism.” Sometimes I’d close the book just to escape from these people.

Taubes deserves credit for having gained access to Rubbia’s crew and presumably their confidence, likely not something most writers could secure. He paints quite a picture of what it takes to be an experimental physicist. Qualities needed include:
• Competitiveness way beyond the norm
• Critical fierceness
• Commitment to workloads that crush the ordinary soul
Cognitive prowess is handy too. A thin skin not so much.

To understand why scientists undertake workloads that crush the ordinary soul, I suggest reading the chapter titled “Natural Science” in The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. One discovers that to most their life style is enviable and the scientific workload as far from a burden as can be. ( )