But Peter Higgs found the school physics syllabus “very boring” and, appreciating the irony, admitted, “I never won a prize for physics at school”.
If the quantum equations are set up independently in these locations in different gauges, the dynamics of my electron and that in another continent or on the moon must be consistently accounted for; the results must be independent of the local choice of gauge. In 1947, in his pioneering work on re-normalizing QED, American theorist Julian Schwinger proved that for this gauge invariance to occur there must be some connection linking the various electrons and allowing us to compare the situation at the different locations. In quantum field theory, this connection consists of particles. The maths implied that the connection cares about direction—it is a vector—and the associated particle acts like a boson because of bosons’ ability to act cooperatively, in this case by building up the vector field connecting the electrically charged particles. So was born the concept of the gauge boson, which in the case of electromagnetism is the familiar photon.
The connection must be able to act over very large distances, and in quantum field theory this equates to the gauge boson having no mass. In summary, Schwinger had proved that gauge invariance implies that an electromagnetic force necessarily occurs between electrically charged bodies, and that this force is carried by a photon of zero mass. That a photon has no mass and travels through the void at nature’s speed limit is fundamental to Einstein’s special relativity theory. However, according to QED the vacuum is not empty because the photon is immersed in a sea of virtual electrons and positrons, which ensnare it, interrupting its flight. As QED implies that an electron at rest gains an infinite energy—or mass—because of these interactions, how does a photon manage to avoid a similar fate?
By carefully examining the formulae in QED theory, Schwinger concluded that gauge invariance in QED underpins this phenomenon of the massless photon. This link between gauge invariance, the existence of a force, the vanishing mass of a photon, and the ability to make QED viable thanks to re-normalization was a profound result, which in the course of time would have far-reaching implications.
Peter Higgs has managed to avoid much of the pace of modern life. In addition to having no television in his Edinburgh apartment, he does not use the internet and is not accessible by email—historically emails sent to him at Edinburgh University would be administered by departmental assistants. He has no public mobile phone contact. Other than personal visits, Higgs has been accessible only by me first leaving messages on a landline answerphone to agree on times for a conversation, or by sending letters through the post.
All atomic particles belong to one of two families: fermions or bosons. The names honour two scientists, Enrico Fermi and Satyendra Bose, who in the early days of quantum mechanics studied how particles behave when in large groups. Fermions are the basic seeds of matter, such as electrons or quarks, which in quantum mechanics are like cuckoos: two in the same nest are forbidden. Bosons are like penguins: large numbers cooperate as a colony. Bosons can accumulate into the lowest possible energy state—an effect known as Bose-Einstein condensation, after the two scientists whose work explains this phenomenon. This extremely low-energy state is manifested in weird phenomena, such as the superfluid ability of liquid helium to flow through narrow openings without friction; in superconductivity; and, if the six theorists were correct, Higgs bosons condense to produce a weird substance—today known as the Higgs field—that fills the universe.
Two millennia after Aristotle argued that the realization of “nothing” is untenable, the Higgs field is in effect a physical confirmation of that philosophy. According to Higgs’ theory, a truly empty vacuum devoid of all matter would be unstable. Add the Higgs field to this void, however, and it becomes stable. This may be counter-intuitive, but that is part of the theory’s magic.
For theories of the fundamental forces, gauge invariance broadly means that the strength of the fields must be independent of the definitions of the potential. For gravity, when an object falls from a table, the speed at which it hits the floor is the same whether that table is on the ground floor or in a room at the top of a high-rise building. It is the change in the gravitational potential—the height from the tabletop to the floor—that matters, not their individual absolute elevation.
Higgs discovered too that his first physics teacher, Mr Willis, had thirty years earlier also taught Paul Dirac.
Most children who have no siblings learn social politics from their interaction with playmates and school friends, but Higgs’ early education in Birmingham had been as much from home as from school and, secluded from much wider merrymaking, he had to find ways of self-entertainment. His father’s bookshelves contained several texts on engineering from his student days at Bristol University. Thanks to this home library, Peter taught himself basic trigonometry, algebra, and calculus “before anyone at a school I went to taught it to me”. He attributes his dedication to mathematics as a direct result of his circumstances: “Physical health problems enabled me to forge ahead of my contemporaries, in maths especially.”
Some, uncharitably, dismiss Higgs’ singular success as luck. Without doubt fortune was involved here, as it is in many discoveries, but being in the right place at the right time is not enough; having the preparation to be able to act on serendipity is also important. Higgs’ story is a scientific analogue of the wisdom expounded by golfer Gary Player. After he holed a remarkable putt to win a major tournament, someone remarked, “Gary—that was lucky!” Player supposedly replied: “And the more I practice, the luckier I become!”
It is easy to be wise once all is understood.
[...] but in then exposing the weakest link in an argument and persisting until he broke through to new vistas.
An arid definition of symmetry in mathematics is a situation where change produces no change. For example, a circle is symmetric under rotation.
Labour government, Chancellor of the Exchequer Stafford Cripps imposed a huge tax on tobacco. Peter Higgs' father Tom Higgs, whom Peter described as a staunch Tory, stated, “I’m not going to contribute to a load of socialists!” and never smoked again.
Ideas were never sold at the market price.
William Waldegrave became so interested that in 1993 he challenged the British physicists to help him explain the Higgs boson and make the case for funding the LHC during discussions with other cabinet ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, of an upcoming budget. He offered a bottle of vintage champagne as prize for the best effort.
A winning entry by David Miller, [...] cleverly used a political analogy to grab Waldegrave’s attention. He imagined the Higgs field as a crowd of political workers at a cocktail party. Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher played the part of a massless particle that enters the room and encounters the field of acolytes. She tries to traverse the room, but the occupants want to shake her hand. This interrupts her, creating inertia. Her interactions with the gathering have altered her from a flighty massless particle into a massive lumbering one. In similar fashion, a massless particle gains inertia—mass—because of its interactions with the ubiquitous Higgs field.
When in 2008, CERN turned on LHC for the first time and media coverage exceeded that of anyone's expectation Eurovision told us that at some time in the day there was a total of one billion people watching. It was probably because they thought we were going to blow up the universe.
The costume turned out to be formal morning dress in the mid-nineteenth-century style of Alfred Nobel’s time. As Higgs recalled, “Getting into the shirt alone takes considerable skill. It was almost a problem in topology.”
Talking about the famous catastrophic electronic short-circuit of LHC The accelerator technicians had made a risk analysis on the joints between electrical cables and concluded that there was only a one-in-ten-thousand chance of failure. The problem is that in the LHC there were a total of ten thousand joints. The vagaries of chance had conspired against them.