A new biography of the physicist and the particle he predicted reveals his disdain for the spotlight
Ten years ago scientists announced one of the most momentous discoveries in physics: the Higgs boson. The particle, predicted 48 years earlier, was the missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. The machine built in part to find this particle, the 27-kilometer-long, circular Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, had fulfilled its promise by showing signals of a new fundamental bit of nature that matched expectations for the Higgs.
One of the biggest shocks I had when I was interviewing him was when he said the discovery of the boson “ruined [his] life.” I thought, “How can it ruin your life when you have done some beautiful mathematics, and then it turns out you had mysteriously touched on the pulse of nature, and everything you’ve believed in has been shown to be correct, and you’ve won a Nobel Prize? How can these things amount to ruin?” He said, “My relatively peaceful existence was ending.
Yes, but how many of us can say we’ve even had one really brilliant idea? There’s no doubt that he had a really brilliant idea. In physics, the people who have done really big things tend to do many big things. Higgs is unique in this being once and once only. It’s easy to dismiss it as luck, and clearly luck was part of it. But being in the right place at the right time, you have to recognize it. Higgs had spent two to three years really trying to understand a particular problem.
Most people have heard of the electromagnetic field. If you add energy to an electromagnetic field, you can excite it into photons. Similarly, there is this stuff we call the Higgs field. If we could apply enough energy to that, we could, in principle, excite it and produce Higgs bosons. The Higgs boson and the Higgs field are analogous to photons and the electromagnetic field.
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