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In a very personal reflective essay, Marzio Nessi, the technical coordinator of the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, recounts Max Boisot’s work and interaction with the particle physics community at ATLAS and CERN, whose research on the Higgs particle, the famous “God particle”, has attracted a lot of media attention. Boisot was interested in the creation of knowledge at ATLAS and studied its unique organization, characterized by collaborative behavior, a bottom-up approach, and a consensus-driven management style, which has enabled this Big Science institution to create a new way of dealing with extreme complexity. Boisot was fascinated by how a scientific collaboration as large as ATLAS generates and sustains creative and constructive interactions among thousands of researchers from diverse cultures, traditions and habits. He believed that the self-organizational capability of the collaboration was the key to success. Boisot’s research also laid the ground for studying how scientific and technical progress is made and how the value of basic research can be captured for society.

Anaximander thought water is a bad idea for a primary substance of the universe because it’s not neutral—it has an opposite, fire. And opposites destroy; they don’t generate one another. If everything in the universe were initially water, it would be impossible to have its opposite, fire, ever created because water destroys fire. Thus, quarks and leptons can’t be primary, for they have opposites, their antimatter versions, and as opposites, matter and antimatter annihilate, not generate, each other. Anaximander taught everything is generated from the apeiron: a timeless, neutral substance, encompassing the universe and constantly transforming into competing transient opposites, but with measure to preserve the cosmic justice—without absolute dominance by either opposite. In physics, it’s ubiquitous energy that’s constantly transforming into competing opposites—matter and antimatter—with measure. Curiously, however, matter (“water”) is more plentiful than antimatter (“fire”). Why? Nobody knows. Where’s the cosmic justice?

Chapter 4 describes a few important steps which have led from the discovery of infinities in quantum electrodynamics in the calculation of Feynman diagrams (ultraviolet divergences (UV divergences)) to the concept of renormalization and renormalization groups (RG). The constructions of quantum (or statistical) field theories (QFTs) and the deeply related RG have been some of the major theoretical achievements in physics of the last century. RG today plays an essential role in the understanding of the properties of QFT and of continuous macroscopic phase transitions. The existence of RG fixed points makes it possible to understand universality when there is no scale decoupling. In particle physics, it leads to the notion of effective field theory and the fine tuning problem in the Higgs particle sector.