{"id":12,"date":"2004-04-12T10:44:10","date_gmt":"2004-04-12T14:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12"},"modified":"2017-10-14T15:01:46","modified_gmt":"2017-10-14T19:01:46","slug":"a-hole-in-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12","title":{"rendered":"A Hole in Texas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A short book review.<\/p>\n<p>This past weekend my scientific activities included reading Herman Wouk&#8217;s new novel &#8220;A Hole in Texas&#8221;.  The plot revolves around the story of the cancellation of the SSC and a supposed discovery of the Higgs Boson by a group of Chinese physicists.   Wouk clearly did a lot of careful research and\/or had some very competent advice since the technical and historical parts of the story are reasonably  accurate.<\/p>\n<p>Wouk has the US Congress and media getting tremendously excited over the Chinese Higgs discovery, leading to massive new funding for high energy physics, a charming but unlikely idea. In general the book is somewhat of a romance\/wish fulfillment novel for older particle physics experimentalists.  The protagonist, an experimentalist formerly involved with the SSC project, gets huge media attention, a lot of money and the use of a private jet,  an old romance revived, a new romance with a beautiful Congresswoman who loves to listen to him explain physics, and funding for his current project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A short book review. This past weekend my scientific activities included reading Herman Wouk&#8217;s new novel &#8220;A Hole in Texas&#8221;. The plot revolves around the story of the cancellation of the SSC and a supposed discovery of the Higgs Boson &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9668,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/9668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}