Three years in the making, “The Dark Matter Discoverer’s Guidebook” – a labour of love and intellectual pursuit – is almost ready for publication. The goal is to have this published and available on or around Dark Matter Day (October 31). This book was born from a pandemic delay, a thirst to better understand dark matter experimental and theoretical methods, and a deep desire to create something for all the physicists in-the-making.
The book came into being in 2021. Jodi had prepared a series of lectures for the Les Houches School on Dark Matter in 2020 … which was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. So she instead took the time to expand the lectures for a special graduate seminar at SMU in spring of 2021. Feedback from the students led to refinements, and some of the lectures were then used at the rescheduled Les Houches school in 2021. When she returned from the school I suggested she should turn the material into a book … a very comprehensive book on both theoretical motivations, experimental approaches, real challenges, and future directions for the field.
I’m the writer in the family. Writing is my solution to just about anything. Jodi was not so convinced this was a good idea, and made it clear writing it up was not so interesting to her. So I offered her a deal: I’ll work up the lectures into a monograph and expand the material, building it up from lecture slides into a detailed work intended to train a new generation of dark matter hunters. If she likes the book, then we’ll do something with it. If not, nothing is wasted. I get practice writing and she controls the fate of her material.
She agreed to the terms.
I would stay up after she went to bed, opening our conservatory windows to let in warm, fresh late-summer Texas air. Coyotes would run down the street in the dark while I typed away at my laptop on a small cafe table in the front room. I loved those nights writing and learning about dark matter scattering, galactic motion, the big bang, material assays and screening, satellite-based astronomy, and axion searches. By early 2022, the book’s most skeletal form was complete.
The same publisher I worked with on “Reality in the Shadows” (with Frank Blitzer and S. James Gates, Jr.) and then “The Friendly Physics Guide to Particle and Nuclear Physics in Modern Medicine” was interested in pressing more into the textbook direction. I suggested the monograph as a starting point for expanding out relationship, and by then Jodi was on-board with the whole project.
Since then, we’ve been writing and editing and writing and editing. A solid draft of the book was truly ready by this past summer. The book project survived the move from Texas to Canada, the change of jobs, and was a critical part of my comfort zone in switching fields of study (from collider physics to astrophysics). Without my experience working on the book with Jodi I would have been far less prepared for the major career pivot in 2022.
You cannot work on a book that long and know if it’s any good. We were fortunate to identify about a half-dozen technical reviewers, each of whom could focus on a specific portion of the book aligned with their expertise. We were nervous. When you work on a project so much and so closely, you know you are missing all the flaws.
That draft of the book had problems, for sure! But the technical reviews have all come back with suggestions for improvement and a general sense that this is a good book project, one with value to the field. We have been gratified by the ideas that came from our reviewers and buoyed by how their suggestions have radically improved key moments in the book. We went from being satisfied with the book to being thrilled about it.
We’re finishing the adoption of the technical edits. The publisher is already sweeping behind us and editing as we wrap up. We’ve got about two rounds of editing left but then it’s entirely in the publisher’s hands. I think the signs are good that we can get this launched for Dark Matter Day!
I’ll keep posting updates on the status of the book as we get firmly into the endgame. I’ve never been so excited about a book in my life. I personally hope it brings value and joy to the lives of the people who need a guide like this to propel their own careers in the field.
