The Higgs boson is what gives objects mass — so you have quantum physics to blame for not fitting into those jeans. (Illustration by Leah Tiscione)
All week, in bars across the country, men and women, young and old, have been caught up in heated arguments about fundamental scalars and neutrino oscillations.
Well, perhaps not, but higgsteria was certainly in the air. There’s even a Higgs joke doing the rounds. (A Higgs boson walks into a church. The priest says, “We don’t let your sort in here.” “Well, you better,” says the boson. “You won’t have mass without me.” Rim shot.) And though most of us came away with little more than the idea that “they” have discovered something called a Higgs boson, that somehow creates a Higgs field, that somehow — wave of magic wand here — turns light into matter, even this level of understanding is quite something. I mean, how often do we get to talk particle physics? On how many days are mysteries of the universe solved? Plus we got to see what scientists look like when they get excited — whoops and high fives and air punches — weirdly just like the rest of us after a touchdown.
The discovery of the Higgs boson fills in a key part of our great modern creation story. In the beginning there was pure light held in perfect symmetry. But the symmetry broke — for reasons we don’t yet fully understand — and within a tiny fraction of a second the universe was born as light and matter inexorably expanding into time and space.
Fourteen billion years later, the universe is still expanding and here we are: what that light became. Many of the stages of this extraordinary story have been filled in, and this last week a cornerstone: how a universe made entirely of massless particles became a universe of matter. No wonder the Higgs is affectionately known as the “God particle.”
THE $10 BILLION EXPERIMENT
However much or little of the detail we may have grasped, and no matter that the announcement was hedged by probabilities — 1 in 35 million against will do for me as proof thank you very much — it is clear that something momentous has happened. Physicists tell us that a long quest has come to a close, and all because a shy Higgs particle has at last been coaxed into view, on at least a couple of occasions, and to two teams working separately on the most expensive experiment ever conducted in the history of the world (universe?) so far.
These teams are among more than 7,000 scientists working deep under mountains on the borders of Switzerland and France. The Large Hadron Collider experiment has so far cost an estimated $10 billion, most of it going on the construction of the collider itself — 27 miles of tunnel, 4 meters wide, containing 1,232 magnets each weighing 30 tons, all useful ammunition for the barroom nerd.
Though America is not part of CERN — the European organization that runs the LHC project — it still contributes considerable funds. Someone is bound to ask — even if in these days of trillion-dollar deficits, when 10 billion dollars looks like chicken feed — is it worth it?
It’s clear what scientists will get out of it. The LHC is to be shut down at the end of the year. Not because the job is done, but because a new era of high-energy physics is about to begin. And that requires, you’ve guessed it, higher energy. The LHC will be upgraded and once back online, protons can be pounded into each other at speeds even more decimal places closer to the speed of light. And, whoopee, we might find out whether this is the Higgs boson, or one of five possible Higgs bosons, or, indeed, discover some unexpected new particle.
Less than 100 years ago, it looked as if there were only three particles in the universe: the electron, proton and neutron. Now there are hundreds of fundamental particles, the Higgs boson the latest addition to what some physicists refer to as the particle zoo. An honored addition: a kind of giant panda perhaps.
It may frustrate the average person, but the brilliance of science is that as soon as it answers a question it discovers more questions. Just when you think you’ve found the most basic ingredients, there’s an entire world underneath.
ASKING THE BIG QUESTIONS
It’s among this particle zoo that scientists are looking for a model that explains the fundamental laws of the universe, including the four forces of nature — the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force and gravity.
The current best model is called the Standard Model and it describes three of these forces. Gravity will have to wait its turn. Now that Higgs is discovered, the Standard Model is pretty much experimentally confirmed. But new models are required to account for everything the Standard Model doesn’t describe – not just gravity, but the dark matter and dark energy that makes up 96% of the universe. There are a lot of missing pieces to the puzzle. Physics is not likely to come to an end anytime soon.
But physics has needed the shot in the arm that the Higgs discovery has given it. Particle physics hasn’t made a quantum leap maybe since the quantum, and though Higgs may not be such a leap forward, it may lead to such a leap.
Physics has found itself at several possible dead-ends in recent decades, one of them being string theory, the only real quantum theory of gravity in town, but which has yet to be elevated out of conjecture to experimentally tested theory.
All the recent scientific excitement has been in biology. But it is worth remembering that biology, even 30 years ago, was seen as a soft observational science, not a proper down-and-dirty discipline like physics or chemistry. All that changed, gradually, with the discovery of the gene molecule, and now, among other innovations, with the first discoveries of how the neural circuitry of the brain works.
The Big Question of biology used to be: What is life? Today the unanswered question glimmering on the horizon is: What is consciousness?
But physics retains its grandeur. What could be more thrilling than discovering that if we look closely enough into the tiniest regions of space we find the conditions that existed when the universe was less than a billionth of a second old? Or that by sending a space observatory, like the Planck telescope launched in 2009, to look in the other direction, out into the deepest regions of space, we end up at the same place, recording the dimmest echoes of the Big Bang?
The poet W. H. Auden once said: ”When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.” These days science is not only aristocratic but has also invaded the territory once guarded by the church. Today much of what passes for religious discourse looks small-minded, shabby even, put next to the rarified debates taking place in science. Organized religion has lost its sense of the cosmic — as if God cared only about our sexual proclivities.
HOW WE BENEFIT
Cosmology is all very well I hear you cry, but what more tangible benefits justify the arcane adventure that is particle physics?
It was once jokingly said that the only clear technological advances that came out of the space race, and that benefitted the general public directly, were the pen that could write upside down and the coating used on non-stick frying pans.
A more realistic list might include improved techniques for kidney dialysis, energy-saving building materials and better rescue equipment, but to make such a profit-and-loss analysis is to miss the point. The space race defined an age, as technology continues to do. It’s just that we can’t predict how it is going to do it.
Particle accelerators generate a huge amount of data. At the LHC today, a billion collisions are recorded every second and the experiments can run for months. The results are produced as complex statistical patterns of energy, the results of cascades of decay products decaying into yet other particles. Out of this data scientists must look for evidence, which may be just one or two collisions of the right sort.
It was because CERN was generating such vast amounts of data even in its early days that Tim Berners-Lee wondered if there was a way that the data could be shared and worked on by scientists across the globe. The benefit to us is the World Wide Web, and if sometimes we might wish to escape it, no one could have guessed in what ways it would change the world.
A more obviously beneficial innovation is the superconducting magnet that, in serried ranks, guides and accelerates the particles around the circular tunnels of the LHC. It led directly to the development of the magnetic resonance imaging technology that is used in all major hospitals.
The answer to the question, “Will the discovery of Higgs lead to some tangible benefit for humankind?” has to be yes, eventually, but it isn’t possible to say when or what form that innovation might take, or even perhaps what steps connect the one to the other.
A PEEK INTO THE FUTURE
But I’ll stick my neck out and look into a crystal ball. I see that some time in the far distant future there are teleportation devices just as predicted in “Star Trek.” I can see, faintly, humans looking back at me, into what is their dim past, to that day when the discovery of the Higgs boson was first reported — July 4, 2012 — acknowledging it as an important step towards the discovery of how to translate matter into light energy and back to matter again.
At some point between now and this distant future, we worked out how to switch off the Higgs field. Without mass, all particles must travel at the speed of light. Dissolving objects into light was a huge task, but nothing compared to the problem of working out how to turn the light back into matter, and matter in the same form that it had had before. But now that we can, the universe has opened up in ways unimaginable in the 21st century.
In those days, it seemed likely that humans might not travel even to the edge of the solar system, but now that we can transport ourselves as light itself the possibility has opened up of travel to distant galaxies. Of course in order to travel to the farthest reaches of the universe we’ll need to travel faster than the speed of light, or control wormholes in space, but these possibilities lie in an even deeper future.
We won’t know if teleportation or distant space travel are possibilities unless we investigate.
It is fortunate that science benefits us, but it isn’t the main motivation for most scientists. There is an unspoken agreement that it is OK for the National Institutes of Health to fund molecular biology or the exploration of the brains of flies, so long as everyone involved pretends that the goal is to improve the health of the population. But many scientists, most of them perhaps, do not turn up to work because of some unpredictable medical benefit down the road; if they are lucky, they turn up to worry away at some precisely defined problem that once solved will take its place as a cog in the large machine that is scientific progress.
At its most reductive, physics searches for the fine stuff out of which the material world is woven. The history of physics is one of increasingly subtle and refined measurement of a reality that is captured by increasingly ingenious and indirect means. Out of the same stuff, we have constructed the material world we live in of smart phones and sat navs. Without quantum theory there would be no transistors; without general relativity no global positioning systems.
CIRCLES AND
STRAIGHT
LINES
Four hundred years ago, Galileo lifted a telescope to the skies and recorded what he saw there. Ever since, technology has been in a dance with experiment and theory. Together they make up what we call the scientific method. Better theories lead to better measurements, but to make better measurements we require better equipment; better experimental results lead to better theories and so the dance starts all over again.
The very idea of progress was alien to the ancients. Life and history moved in circles. What went around came around. We may look to the past for wisdom, but who among us wants to live there? However uncertain, we’d rather live here, on the edge of the future, drawn on by the enticement of greater understanding. Forward.
Christopher Potter is the author of “You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe” (HarperCollins).