This nice little article by Frank Close appeared in today’s Guardian, summarises where we’ve got to in understanding the origins of the universe and identifying the tiniest of subatomic particles. I saw Professor Close give a very interesting lecture on a day trip when I was studying physics at school. He is notable for being probably the only scientist in the country whose name is an anagram of a breakfast cereal. Apart from Dr Kris Ricepies, of course.

I can recommend Frank Close’s book The Cosmic Onion. Out soon (which probably explains the Guardian article) is his new book, The Particle Odyssey.

Incidentally, I am posting this via the new Mail-to-Blogger system, so it may come out mangled…

Addendum: It did come out mangled because of line breaks in the e-mail, which particularly affected the HTML tags.