A Hole in Texas Author:Herman Wouk Guy Carpenter is a physicist with a quiet,settled life: a prestigious job at NASA, a devoted wife and new baby, and a troublemaking cat. But he is about to get mixed up in an international scandal of enormous proportions. — Years ago, Guy worked on the Superconducting Super Collider, a giant government project dedicated to detecting a tiny, elusi... more »ve particle called the Higgs boson. Wrangling in Congress shut the project down before it could succeed, but now the Chinese claim to have found the boson. It is a discovery that sends the nation into a panic. How did the Chinese surpass American science? What about the horrific military implications of a Boson Bomb? Is it time to start casting Hollywood's first boson-based blockbuster? An expert is needed to assess the new threat to national security.
Guy is propelled into the center of the media blitz, his old love with a Chinese female physicist resurfaces, a new romance with a beautiful Congresswoman beckons, and the breakup of his happy marriage threatens. In the meantime, Congress holds urgent hearings, Hollywood comes courting, the CIA is investigating, and an unctuous reporter dogs his every step.« less
This is the first novel by Herman Wouk for me and I must say that I really liked it. When the Chinese beat the US to the Higgs boson, astrophysicist, Guy Carpenter gets caught up in the hoopla and has to appear before a congressional hearing on possible charges of a breach in national security. His relationship with the top Chinese scientist and his secret post office box, get him in water with his wife.
There's a lot going on and when the talk involves the superconduction super collider, it gets rather technical. I didn't understand the half of it but it didn't have any impact in my enjoyment of the story.