Out of sight

A history of modern physics sheds light on the contribution of women scientists.

- JENNY NICHOLLS

Suzie Sheehy: distinctive humans and disintegrating atoms.

THE MATTER OF EVERYTHING: Twelve experiments that changed our world, by Suzie Sheehy (Bloomsbury, $32.99)

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," quipped the late physicist Richard Feynman, awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics. His words surged to mind when I was at a party one time and overheard a group discussing homeopathy. "There's no point in explaining it - you don't understand quantum physics," one of them haughtily told an interloper.

Feynman, a towering figure in 20th-century physics, gets a glancing mention in Suzanne Sheehy's refreshing and readable history of modern physics, which tends to celebrate the lives of lesser-known scientists, many of them women. Even those who don't know their quarks from their gluons will be able to follow her on a journey through an emerging science, particle physics, via 12 experiments from 1895 to 2012.

The first of them came about through a mixture of luck and curiosity in a lab presided over by just one man, Wilhelm Röntgen. The last, leading to the discovery of the Higgs boson, required the collaboration of 110 countries and “roughly half of the 13,000 particle physicists in the world”, Sheehy writes.