Prof Peter Higgs developed the theory of an elusive subatomic particle, the Higgs boson, which, if found, will help explain the fundamental nature of matter. He's confident it will turn up, writes DICK AHLSTROM
HAVE YOU ever heard of the Higgs boson? Do you have any idea what it is? Many people can say yes to the first question but must answer no to the second, a testament if ever there was one to the power of marketing.
Physicist Leon Lederman, with Dick Teresi, wrote a book in 1993 about the search for the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that exists only in theory. He wanted to call it "the goddamn particle" given the great difficulty posed in finding it, but nervous publishers hit on something less blasphemous and highly marketable, The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?
The name stuck and now many people know about the search for the God particle, the Higgs boson. The man who originally theorised the particle is a bit cool on the whole thing, however. “I didn’t like that at all,” says Prof Peter Higgs, FRS and emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh.
Prof Higgs was in Dublin last week, an international peer involved in a periodic review of the work being done by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He took time to talk about his namesake particle and how it might soon be proven to exist by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful atom smasher in the world.
The €4 billion LHC is based at Cern, the European centre for nuclear research. It is a 27km-long, ring-shaped tube built into a tunnel under the French-Swiss border. It sends two beams of atomic particles, protons, in opposite directions around the ring, finally smashing them together in powerful collisions that break the protons up into even smaller bits, a collection of subatomic particles that cannot be broken down any further.
The collection of particles has grown steadily over the past 30 years. These were gradually built into something called the Standard Model that explained all of these particles in the context of the fundamental nature of matter. All the pieces of the Standard Model puzzle have now been found bar one – the Higgs boson. Higgs developed a theory that described the need for this elusive particle and physicists, and the public, await word from Cern in the coming months and years that the Higgs boson has finally been found.
Higgs is confident that experimenters at Cern or possibly at Fermilab in Chicago using the Tevatron accelerator will finally find a Higgs particle. During a visit to Cern in 2008 he was asked how sure he was that the particle would emerge. “I stuck my neck out and said 90 per cent confident,” he says.
If it is not identified then something is seriously wrong with the Standard Model, he says. “As theoreticians we think, how can you then make the theory efficient? The theory doesnt work any more. So all I can say is if there isn’t a Higgs boson then there better be something there that looks very like it. In a way you can’t afford not to have a particle like that.”
His famous particle might not have been searched for, or at least could have carried a different name, given it was a toss-up whether Higgs would study maths or science at school and then university. “At the beginning of secondary school in Bristol I really didn’t have a clear idea of what I was going to do,” he says.
He was more into his books than sport at school, he says. “I suffered a lot with asthma and it was brought on by vigorous physical exercise.” He was banned from the sports fields as a result. “I therefore had more time to be bookish.” Seeing an unusual name that kept appearing on boards listing the accomplishments of former students – Paul Dirac, a later winner of the Nobel Prize for physics – helped bring him to science. “Certainly the fact that Dirac had been a pupil at my school made me curious to know what he had done,” Higgs says. He went to study at King’s College, University of London. Even then he still wondered whether to study maths or physics. “I decided I could pick up maths rather easily but had to work at physics. For me it was the tougher option.” He had heard speakers describing the new discoveries emerging from particle physics and he gravitated towards it.
“During my undergraduate years it became clear I was not cut out to become an experimentalist,” he says. He completed a PhD and also developed a lifelong love for Scotland. “I visited Edinburgh while I was still an undergraduate. In 1949, I went to the third Edinburgh festival. It was my first visit to Scotland.” He would later settle there and remains there to this day.
His career only progressed “rather in fits and starts”, and up to the mid-1950s his work “hadn’t really made an impact”. In 1960, he took a lectureship in Edinburgh and from then his path was littered with Nobel prize-winning physicists such as Glashow, Abdus Salam, Veltman and Nambu. In that year, Nambu published an important physics paper that would inspire Higgs. “That immediately set me off on a programme of work.” Then, in 1964, the breakthrough came and “I knew what I had to do”. He merged two things that he had already studied “but had never properly brought together at that point”, in the process delivering the Higgs theory.
He published a paper and then another but his discovery was not an overnight success. “It took another seven years,” he says. “The initial reaction was fairly negative. They didn’t believe me.”
By the early 1980s there were no doubts about his discoveries, in particular the Higgs boson, although he didn’t really know where it was all going to lead. “I was pretty sure it was going to be important somewhere.”
Now it is fundamental to particle physics and people await the discovery of the Higgs boson. “It was likely it would be the last [particle] on the list to be discovered,” he says. “What it actually did was give people confidence about everything in that [Standard] Model.”
Since the 1980s, Higgs’s name has been attached to almost everything to do with the boson and how it works, including Higgs theory and Higgs field. “That just isn’t fair because it neglects to mention others that contributed,” he says.
“The embarrassing thing at the beginning, when the theory breakthrough arrived, was that it was my name that got attached to much of the theory. The only thing I see as my own is the Higgs particle.”
