Knocking on heaven's door

In Knocking on heaven's door: how physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world Lisa Randall looks at the place of science in society, and in particular at what some of the large scale experiments are aiming to achieve.

The book starts will a look at the development of science from ancient times to Galileo and Newton and on to the present day, discussing the motivations of scientists, the nature of creativity and the relationship of science and religion. Much of the book is concerned with the Large Hadron Collider, telling of the huge detectors there and the search for the Higgs boson and other particles. Randall explains the predictions of various models and how they can be compared using the results from the LHC.

I thought the book contained much of interest, in particular the explanations of what the LHC is looking for. It's written in a non-technical way, but I thought that some people might find it rather a long book - in a way it's two books, one on Randall's viewpoint on science and society, and one on the LHC, so maybe it's more for those who have already read a few books on the subject.