“The Hermes Experiment,” a new book by MIT physics Professor Richard Milner and FAU Erlangen-Nurnberg Professor Erhard Steffens, tells the story of how several hundred physicists from Europe and North America collaborated in 1988 to design, construct, and operate the innovative HERMES experiment at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, with the goal of studying the fundamental spin structure of matter. The book serves as a primer on subatomic physics and provides a personal look into how physics gets done, from how scientists secure funding and build teams to what it…
