NONFICTION - April 23, 1995

THE PARTICLE GARDEN: Our Universe as Understood by Particle Physicists by Gordon Kane (Addison-Wesley/Helix Books: $22; 224 pp.). I guess I’ll have to get a new dictionary of scientific literary--the one I currently own contains entries for bosons and fermions, but not their hypothetical superpartners, which bear names such as winos and gluinos, squarks and stops. (There’s no entry for hadrons, either, the bane of dyslexic scientists.) Gordon Kane, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan, attempts in “The Particle Garden” to make sense of current atomic physics, but he seems to be writing primarily for science-minded college students, and with none of the verve that his misleadingly poetic title implies. The physics-literate may be interested to know that Kane covers up-to-date theorizing on supersymmetry and Higgs physics, but as for me . . . give a nudge when these complex hypothesizes are closer to demonstrable fact, when they have been translated into a language the non-scientist can at least appreciate, if not fully understand.