It's not often the very first person you meet in a movie is a mathematician. The second, third and fourth people on screen also being mathematicians is even rarer. But the movie Travelling Salesman is a rare movie: not only are almost all of the characters mathematicians, the central plot also hinges on the solution of one of the most important problems in mathematics.

Quantum physics is hard. And weird. There's just no getting around it. It takes Plus a lot of tea and biscuits to write anything about the quantum world. But since discovering John Polkinghorne's book it thankfully has become a little bit easier.

Sometimes it doesn't feel like the world is a very nice place. The news is filled with war, political conflict, crime – it seems we just can't get along. So it is very cheering indeed to read a book dedicated entirely to convincing you that we are actually very helpful to one another and that the whole world as we know it is only possible thanks to cooperation. And surprisingly the authors don't use psychology or sociology to make their argument – they use maths.

Higgs Force traces the history of the human quest for understanding how the Universe works, starting from the atomic ideas of the ancient Greeks and finishing with the launch of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It is a remarkable fact that the author was able to present it as a continuous story, tracing the analogies between the earliest ideas of elements (fire-air-water-earth) and the accepted current theory of elementary particles.

