Serene attention is what I gave to the 850-page Booker Prize winner The Luminaries while on holiday in Italy. This three-day commitment was entirely worthwhile; skimming would have been pointless.

Jon Butterworth’s thrilling book got the post-modern treatment. I had no choice. I knew there would be sections, some closely linked with a reasonably accessible narrative, which I had no hope of comprehending even if I reread them ten times. I let my eyes slide until some real-world language reappeared and continued onwards. Butterworth expects this and even writes: ‘If you just skipped that bit, welcome back.’

You pick up the text, put it down, go to the Internet and find a video of Butterworth giving a lecture at the Royal Institution in London with his chum Brian Cox, watch it for forty-five minutes, go back to the book, and read on. This works, because Butterworth has written Smashing Physics as a running blog – in fact I suspect much of it comes from his blogging on the work at CERN and the Large Hadron Collider which led to the discovery in 2012 of the Goddam Particle.

CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, is now sixty years old. It is older than the European Union and was set up to help attract physicists back to Europe following their mass exodus to America when the Nazis came to power. The Large Hadron Collider is ten years old (not counting the decade in planning) and is the largest apparatus on Earth, being twenty-seven miles in circumference, about the same as the Circle Line of the London Underground. Its successor, now being planned, will be one hundred miles long.

The LHC (get used to the acronyms) is a vehicle for hurling protons at each other in circles maintained by gigantic magnets. These force the particles to go around when what they really want to do is travel in straight lines. Two lots, sent off in opposite directions, will smash into each other and break up into their constituent entities: quarks and gluons. These names are surreal in an Irish kind of way, having in part been derived from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. There comes a point when you can’t tell your mesons from your croutons – but worry not.

This is the story of what Brian Cox (who works at CERN) called ‘the greatest discovery of my lifetime’: how they found the Higgs. It also tells how the world was transfixed, almost without exception, by physics of which they had very little understanding. How come?

We knew that it was fundamental, had something to do with how the universe worked, cost a lot, and could possibly, though Butterworth trashes this thought convincingly, end civilisation as we know it. The media-fest began when the LHC started its test run in 2011 and ended nine days later, when a fault in the engineering caused an explosion and massive damage. The book describes just how shattered the three thousand scientists and technicians were, much more than they admitted at the time. Start again. The problem was fixed. Another test run began. The tunnel in which the particles were fired was cooled to minus 270 Kelvin, making it colder than any other part of the cosmos. Test runs were OK. The build up to full power began.

Fifty years ago, Peter Higgs and five of his colleagues had written papers predicting something emerging from The Standard Model of physics with its four forces (electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force and gravity) and those Irish particles. They said that something was missing. Yes, there were bosons like the W and Z which could mediate the nature of the weak force, but where was a boson to give everything mass? Although the force of gravity cannot at this stage be reconciled with the model – yet we know gravity exists, every time we drop a spoon.

Mass, by the way, isn’t just weight. You can have a concrete post floating weightlessly in space, but if you kick it, your foot still hurts – because the post has mass. And this is where my mind boggles, again. The Higgs boson isn’t another particle, like a lump, that hangs on other particles, giving them heft. It is a kind of ripple in space-time whose energy and decay they can predict and, with an LHC smash, identify, and pin down experimentally.You do this by means of Feynman diagrams. Richard Feynman, one of the great geniuses and characters of the twentieth century, doodled to help his own understanding of how colliding particles (whose path and position cannot be identified at any one time) would rebound. These, and his related expositions on quantum electrodynamics, won him the Nobel Prize in 1965.

The day came at the LHC. Two teams, one of them Butterworth’s, did their separate investigations. The feeling was good, verging on the ecstatic. At the press conference there was standing room only. Despite the strict care taken by everyone who spoke not to exaggerate the precise nature of the discovery, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that this was THE BREAKTHROUGH – and it was. The two teams had matching results. A Nobel Prize went to Peter Higgs (and François Englert) and there were drinks all round. Higgs himself celebrated with his favourite beer, London Pride, on the way home.

So what to do when you hit the impassible matrices of Butterworth’s quantum prose? Here is a simpler sentence: ‘It contains some techniques for solving differential equations and for doing multidimensional integrals, matrix manipulation and coordinate transformations.’ Then there is my favourite new word at the top of page 125, ‘renormalisability’, which by the bottom of the page is matched by ‘non-renormalisable theory’.

Do what I do. Confess that even a week’s research won’t illuminate the technical stodge. Leap to the open clarity and gossipy fun of the next pellucid passage and read on. It is the postmodern way. And Smashing Physics is worth it.