The God Particle
A Novel
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
There is a divine spark within us all. In one man, that spark is about to explode.
American businessman Steve Keeley is hurtled three stories to the cold cobblestone street in Zurich. In the days that follow, a doctor performs miraculous surgery on Keeley, who wakes up to find that everything about his world has changed. He seems to sense things before they happen, and he thinks he’s capable of feats that are clearly impossible. It’s a strange and compelling new world for him, one he quickly realizes is also incredibly dangerous.
Meanwhile at a $12 billion facility in hardscrabble North Texas, a super collider lies two hundred feet beneath the Earth’s surface. Leading a team of scientists, Mike McNair, a brilliant physicist, works to uncover one of the universe’s greatest secrets—a theoretical particle that binds the universe together, often called The God Particle. When his efforts are undermined by the man who has poured his own vast fortune into the project, McNair begins to suspect that something in his research has gone very, very wrong.
Now, these two men are about to come together, battling mysteries of science and of the soul—and venturing to a realm beyond reason, beyond faith, perhaps even beyond life and death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A bizarre human experiment complicates a physicist's quest for the Nobel Prize in Cox's engaging, challenging second novel, a wryly comic thriller that incorporates several concepts from modern particle theory. The story hinges on two parallel and apparently unrelated story lines in the more credible one, Texas physicist Mike McNair is involved in a high-pressure chase to detect the Higgs field and find the so-called "God particle" that will provide crucial insights into the nature of matter, time and the universe. As McNair closes in on his goal, an executive named Steve Keeley is nearly killed in Zurich after visiting a prostitute and being thrown from a window by an overzealous bouncer. Keeley miraculously survives, but the surgery that saves his life also produces a variety of strange symptoms. When Keeley sees a TV interview with McNair on the eve of the scientist's pivotal discovery, he realizes that his symptoms reflect a version of the Higgs field in his head that has given him near-psychic powers. Cox does a nice job handling a complex subject, but for all his erudite scientific writing and his humorous treatment of McNair's dating difficulties, his execution of the "mad scientist conducts an experiment that runs amok" plot line remains uneven at best.
