Never has so much been expected of a scientific machine. The Large Hadron Collider, 30 years in the planning, promises to shed new light on nature’s fundamental laws and particles, thus justifying its multi-billion-US dollar price tag to the governments that have footed the bill. “If the Collider doesn’t deliver some really sexy discoveries,” one of the world’s most illustrious experimenters recently whispered to me, “particle physicists will be fucked.”
He may be right. Physicists can never know in advance what they will find, and so have to guess, using theories they hope will be found wanting. In making bids for government funding, scientists have to appeal to politicians’ sense of curiosity and their sense of intellectual adventure. If all else fails, they can point to past successes of curiosity-driven research, such as quantum mechanics, which provides the theoretical underpinning of microelectronics.
One of the aims of the LHC is to discover and study the particle named after the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh. Almost 50 years ago he studied a deceptively simple question: why do most of the most basic particles in nature have mass? Why aren’t they all like particles of light, with no mass at all? Higgs and others speculated that most fundamental particles acquire part of their mass by interacting with a hitherto undetected field, as invisible as gravity and stretching across the entire universe. This mysterious field should manifest itself through the existence of a particle, but it has yet to be observed. Theoreticians predict it should be very heavy (by subatomic standards) and have only the briefest of lives: after each one is born, death should follow almost immediately, about a hundred trillionths of a trillionth of a second later when it decays into less interesting progeny.
Higgs himself has proved almost as elusive as his eponymous particle. Until now. Ian Sample, a science writer on the Guardian, persevered long enough to secure an interview with him, and the results are among the highlights of Massive, a lively account of the genesis of both the LHC and its most famous particulate quarry.
Higgs turns out to be an excellent interviewee. He gives a vivid account of the idea’s inception. As with all really new ideas, it was firmly resisted by orthodoxy’s ever-present army of defenders. Higgs says he was “gripped by a surge of panic” when driving to Princeton in the spring of 1966 to present his theory to the Institute for Advanced Study. Higgs had good reason to be afraid. At Harvard, the tough-talking theoretician Sidney Coleman was planning to have some fun, later confessing that he told his students: “You’re going to tear him
to shreds!”
By the late 1970s, the Higgs theory was in the textbooks, even though it had not been directly supported by experiment. Higgs, a humble and likeable man, was something of a living legend among his colleagues; though, as he admits here, he was struggling to produce new ideas and to keep up with the next generation. No matter, he had done what eludes the great majority of scientists: conceived a really new idea and changed the way physicists think about the universe.
Sample has interviewed quite a few other leading scientists, too, and proves adept at prizing insights from them. The book’s focus sometimes wanders, but we are kept hooked by its fine reportage, which makes clear the sheer achievement of the scientists and engineers who have built the LHC, the most complex machine ever made in the service of pure science. We learn, too, of the many theoretical concepts that will be probed by it. Quite apart from the Higgs particle, there are high hopes that the collider will demonstrate the existence of a special kind of symmetry, known as supersymmetry, in nature’s fabric; this notion, too, has been around for years, but has yet to be confirmed or refuted experimentally. It is also just possible that the machine will give us first evidence for higher dimensions.
But what if the collider finds no Higgs particles? That would set the theoreticians a wonderfully exciting puzzle — but give the leaders of the physics community a lot of explaining to do. Either way, as Sample says, the story will be massive.
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
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