Peter Higgs is not an easy topic for a biographer to deal with. The 93-year-old British physicist who won half the Nobel laureate in 2013, is extremely shy, unavailable for email and cell phones, pretends to be unattractive. On top of all that, physicist Frank Close took the task of describing him during the COVID-19 riots, which destroyed Close’s archeological schemes and contacted Higgs extensively.
But the author is, man can not resist saying, a close friend of Higgs, and constantly discusses his topic on the landline. An obscure title referring to both the man and the subatomic particles he predicted ended up being a cool but instructive book that combines Higgs’ life story and the construction of a beautiful theoretical structure known as the typical particle physics model. . In 1964, Higgs contributed an important piece to that model, demonstrating the existence of a particle later known as the Higgs boson that fills all other particles in quantity. Higgs was successfully won at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2012. Higgs ’attention one distinguishes this book from the science fiction novel Jim Baggott’s 2012 book Higgs, which talks a lot about science and leaves only a few pages of the man himself.
Close provides a quick account of Higgs’ advisors, interests and a depressing episode that set him apart from physics. We learn about the elements that make up Higgs’ career — his first education in Bristol, UK, and graduation from King’s College London, inspiring statistics (physicists Charles Coulson and Paul Dirac) and political career roles, such as his membership. of the Nuclear Campaign. Disarmament, creating a network of contacts. These influences grew his interest in quantum field theory, which eventually forced him to face a very complex dilemma the discipline he was facing: why is there so much?
The unmistakable similarity of Higgs’ personal story with a drawing of the many pieces that have gone into the construction of a typical model: theoretical framework provided by quantum field theory, solutions to multiple problems in model structure, and all the elements and fields of theory. included. But the main thing was missing – how to explain how basic particles can weigh, and why they have so many components.
Missing episode
The prevailing theory was that a type of particle called boson could eliminate the problem that hindered attempts at mass accounting. Close works well with a tricky and potentially controversial issue of five other physicists who came up independently with the same idea at the same time. He cites others who say that, due to all the advances that led to this understanding, Higgs was actually a “very young player”, or that his role was a matter of luck. But Close forgives Higgs’ name attached to the particles, because both have predicted that the boson exists, and he suggested a way to identify it.
Some details are amazing. Higgs’ speech, while eating dinner at Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, was taken by a journalist. It touches on Stephen Hawking’s reaction to Higgs’ work and was appropriately published on the front pages of newspapers to suggest that Higgs made a “deep personal attack” on a wheelchair-bound psychologist, which led to unnecessary disagreements between the two physicists. Other exciting details include Higgs’ plans to hide in 2013 when the Nobel laureate will be announced.
Close has an amazing ability to combine complex ideas into accessible metaphors. Fermions and bosons are compared to cuckoos and penguins (the first can not live together, the latter live in groups), the flexibility of the cage is compared to flying (the required travel time does not depend on the place where the journey began), the chest nucleus in bears in a cave. Sometimes, metaphors come very quickly – in one verse, Vala compares Higgs’ research textbook with baseball points (“three hits, three runs, no errors”) and the composer’s works (“Salieri had a much higher oeuvre than -Mozart, but who cares?
The reader learns to wait for the next high-level metaphor, and this is frustrating after a while Higgs as a Everest rider, Higgs as Banquo in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Higgs as a “midwife of change”. This last trope is totally false. The standard model was about half a century before the discovery of LHC; it was clear that the model depended on the solution to a major problem; and the designers have been making great strides over the years. Higgs was very similar to the man who designed the long-awaited piece to hold a public meeting place in the field. Close simplification may be embarrassing when it comes to social media, such as when he wrote about Higgs, visiting the United States. 1960s, finding that it was not a “milk and honey nation” because it “had a lot of poverty”. When the Higgs train to Washington DC was blocked by snow, it was shocking to read Close to speak an additional yet well-intentioned fact – that the hurricane “killed a large number of black Americans living in wooden slums”.
The cover of Elusive says the book “will renew our understanding of modern physics”. What can justify such an exaggerated claim? They are certainly not scientific explanations; scientists and science writers have been explaining what Higgs has been doing since winning his Nobel Prize nine years ago. What is most interesting about this book is that it sometimes shows you talking a lot about physicists. They are not the unscrupulous intellectuals who study data points and the mind to reach their conclusions, but people who are passionate and committed to those whose research method is often inaccurate and are marked by missed moments and encounters of opportunities. Elusive shows how the life story of a physicist, well-articulated, can reveal much about life as an expert.
Source Journal Reference: Robert P. Crease, Peter Higgs: the man behind the God particle, nature Book review (2022), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01811-y
