The Rogues Gallery

The Higgs Hubbub

Famous physicist Peter Higgs was quoted recently claiming that he believes proof will soon exist of a force that imbues all objects in the universe with mass making life (and a few other things) possible.

If you’ve been a physics celibate the past few years, I’m referring to the quest for the Higgs particle at the soon to be opened LHC or Large Hadron Collider. A particle he prophesied over 40 years ago to some derision from his colleagues at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Higgs told journalists recently
“The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly … I’m more than 90 percent certain that it will,”

About 15 years ago physicist Leon Lederman wrote a book called the God Particle about Higgs and his quest. The name stuck, much to the chagrin of Peter Higgs.

“It embarrasses me,” He said in Geneva this week at a news conference.
He continues: “Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”

Lederman explains that he called it the God particle for a couple of reasons.

He says in his book:
“This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddam Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one…

Lederman then quotes the Tower of Babel story and the dispersion of mankind it caused. He explains that finding the Higgs would be like undoing the confusion caused a Babel.

But why did Higgs even propose this wacky idea in the first place?

Well in the mid sixties, work was being done to combine two of the four forces of nature (electromagnetism and the weak force) into one force called the electroweak force. In the 1800s, Maxwell and other scientists showed that electricity and magnetism were actually manifestations of the same force: electromagnetism. Now it was time for the weak nuclear force to join the fold. Ultimately, scientists would love to combine all forces into one beautiful unified force from which all broke out in the early universe. Some believe that the strong force will ultimately succumb and join the Electroweak Unification in what is called the Grand Unification. This is probably well beyond us currently since some solutions require toasty temperatures around 10 to the 27 Kelvin. The force of gravity though is truly the red-haired step-brother in this force family. It is by far the weakest force. How far? Well, it’s about 10 to the 36 times weaker than the mighty strong force. Only because gravity is additive and far reaching does it have the obvious universe-wide impact that it does. Unifying gravity with the other forces is of course the ultimate goal but it makes Grand Unification look like a cake walk. Creating this Quantum Gravity would require, among other things, converting bosons into fermions and that just sounds really really hard. Time to jump off this tangent train.

Ok. Back to Higgs. Early electroweak theories presented a problem because they required bosons that were massless. Bosons are pretty cool. Particles that convey fundamental forces are all bosons like photons which carry the Electromagnetic force or gluons which mediate the strong force. The electroweak bosons (W and Z particles) were not massless though. Therefore in order to account for their mass, Higgs came up with a field (now called the Higgs field) which imparts mass to other particles. It should be noted that Higgs came up with this idea concurrently with two Belgian physicists, Brout and Englert.

The Higgs particle, or more appropriately, the Higgs boson can be thought of as a dense area in the Higgs field like a water droplet in water vapor. The Higgs field can’t really be directly detected but, theoretically, the Higgs boson can. If you find one, then it’s easier to believe in the other. In this sense, the Higgs boson is like the herald of the Higgs field kind of like how the Silversurfer is the herald of Galactus. (you like how I threw that in there?)

Putting this all together, Peter Higgs describes matter as therefore weightless at the moment of the bigbang. Once the Higgs field reached a non-zero value and matter started moving through it, everything acquired mass. He describes it as the field somehow sticking to particles as they pass through it making them heavy like they were moving through molasses. If this didn’t happen, matter would have floated free in space and stars and planets would never have formed.

So give Higgs some thanks the next time mass makes an impact in your life.