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 scientific project dedicated to detecting a tiny, elusive particle, the Higgs Boson. Wrangling in Congress shut the project down before it could fulfill its objective, but now the Chinese claim to have found the Boson-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 blockbuster? An expert is needed to assess the new threat to national security. Before he knows it, Carpenter 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, and an unctuous reporter dogs his every step. It's going to be anything but a typical few weeks. Once again, Herman Wouk exercises his deep insight and considerable comic powers to give us a witty and keen satire about Washington, the media, and science, and what happens when these three great forces of American culture clash.