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Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we’ll look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle.
Transcript
Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription
Fraser Cain:
Astronomy Cast Episode 716: The God Particle – Remembering Peter Higgs. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand, not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest.
Hey, Pamela. How you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I am doing well. I am still trying to get my sleep back on schedule after having a bunch of our CosmoQuest community mods come out and hang out during the eclipse week and all the events around that. It was a tremendous event, and it was so good to see so many people face-to-face, including some I had never met in person. At one point, we had 14 humans and four spare dogs in the house during the leadup to the eclipse as everyone was prepping.
Fraser Cain:
Wow. Well, your house can absorb that.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It can.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Although, keeping the dogs separated as necessary was a fascinating game of gates.
Fraser Cain:
Right. But we were off last week because we were enjoying the eclipse and victory for both of us.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
We both saw totality, clear skies. It was perfect. So, yay us.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
We did it. We did it. No need to ever travel again for an eclipse.
Fraser Cain:
No way. I wanna see more. But it was amazing. And I think for everybody out there who’s listening to this, if you did get a chance to see it, congratulations. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, the cosmic geometry continues, and you will get more chances in the future and some travel ideas. So, keep trying out there. And, yeah. Yeah, I’m so glad that we got a chance to see it after 2017 –
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
– when we didn’t get a chance to see it.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
We tried. We tried.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
The universe mocked us.
Fraser Cain:
Yes. Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and the discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle. All right, Pamela. Who is Peter Higgs?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
He was a British theoretical physicist who every single thing I found to read described him as shy, as filled with creativity and curiosity, and just not wanting to be a famous person, but willing to explain science to anyone and break down the concepts as much as was needed to help them understand.
He’s not someone I ever met, but after all the reading I did for this episode, I really am sad I never met him. There aren’t enough personable theoretical physicists who actually can break things down because, most of the time, they’re just working at such a high level that bringing it down to even the level of an observational astronomer isn’t something that happens.
Fraser Cain:
But let’s talk about his, I don’t know, discovery. What’d you call it, his theory?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
His background.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah. His background, but also leading up to his – man, what’s the right word? I guess, his theory of that there should be a particle that connects mass to the universe. Was he the person that figured this out?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, he was one of them. And so, basically, this is the story of everything working exactly the way it’s supposed to. He went to a private school when he was in high school, or a magnet school; I’m not quite what the right words are.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, I know. It’s like public school means not what you think it is, and private school doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right. Right, not in England. No.
Fraser Cain:
Right, right, right. So, did he go to the one where the regular people go to or the one where people pay for them to go to?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
He went to the one that Paul Dirac had gone to, and that’s the key point.
Fraser Cain:
Okay.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
He went to the same high school. I think that’s the closest explanation word, that Paul Dirac had graduated well before him. But he knew about Paul Diran because was an alumni, and he decided that he wanted to follow in Paul Dirac’s footsteps and become a physicist. He moved to the city of London so that he could go to a more exclusive, finishing off the rest of high school, before starting university. And so, this really starts by being this is someone who had a role model, and that role model inspired them to do great things with their life.
So, first of all, win; I like this story already. He then bounced around. Did his undergraduate. Hitchhiked for a while. Fell in love with the city of Edenborough while hitchhiking, which is just pleasing. It was the ’50s. It was safer back then. Got his PhD when he was 25. Did the same thing that still happens today. He bounced around. He was a lecturer here, a lecturer there.
And when he was 35, he submitted a paper to physics letters that outlined how mass – which at that point in time couldn’t be explained. Like, everything we knew about particle physics at that point in time said a lot of the key particles should not have any mass. But they have mass. And so, there was this very deeply confusing issue.
Fraser Cain:
And at this point, there was the standard model of particle physics that had a lot of the bits and pieces already figured out.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. It wasn’t as complete.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Right. We knew about the proton, the neutron, the electron –
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
– but also the quarks and the various particles, the subatomic particles –
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
– some of which had been confirmed in both particle accelerators and others which hadn’t. But everyone just assumed they had to be there.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right.
Fraser Cain:
It was just a matter of time before they were found.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And so, he was working on trying to understand how symmetries get broken, how you make space for mass to exist. And he put together a theory that brought together both the boson that would go on to hold his name and a scaler field that permeated all of space and time that particles couple with through that boson. And it’s through that coupling that objects end up having what we discern as having mass in our laboratories.
And the paper was soundly rejected. And I love this part of the story because he submits the work; the paper gets rejected from a journal that was published out of CERN. So, the laboratory that would eventually be the one that discovers the Higgs boson said, “No science for you. Do not believe.”
Fraser Cain:
Yep.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And he added one paragraph to the paper. Submitted it to a different journal, Physics Review, and it got published. Now, here is where he is such an awesome human.
So, his work was not the only work on trying to understand this. There were three different teams at the time that were all working on this at the same time. And throughout his entire life, he always gave credit to all the other teams. And so, you see it called the Higgs field. You see it called by a variety of other different names. And he made sure every time he referred to it he listed everyone involved, usually by an alphabet soup of all their names, which is about the nicest thing a human being could do.
And in preparing for this episode, I was rewatching – and I didn’t make it all the way through – but I was rewatching Particle Fever, which is a documentary.
Fraser Cain:
That’s a great documentary.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It’s by David Kaplan. It’s available not for streaming, but you can purchase it or rent it pretty much everywhere. And he’s not playing a major role in it. And so, while they have all these other physicists where they’re like, “This human only writes papers with three authors because Nobel Prizes can only go to three people” –
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
– Peter Higgs is like shown crying when they find the – well, he’s not doing this. He’s wiping away tears. But Peter Higgs is just like, they found it. He’s so sweet, so nice. And they catch him crying. And everyone else is just like, ughhh, because they weren’t the ones getting the Nobel Prize. And here he is, the day – this is my favorite story so far.
So, everyone knows when they’re gonna be making the calls for the Nobel Prize. The people who are nominated often have an idea. They don’t know who’s gonna be the winner, but they know to stay home and stay next to the phone. And Peter Higgs went out for a walk and left his phone at home because he didn’t wanna deal with it. And it was one of his neighbors as he’s walking home that lets him know.
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
“Dude, you got the Nobel Prize in physics.” And it’s just awesome.
Fraser Cain:
So, he had predicted this particle and the field and the interactions between these two. And I think that’s the key.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
You know, it’s very easy to just say, oh, there’s gotta be some field that contributes to mass. There’s gotta be some particle that makes mass. But to recognize this connection –
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
– between the particle, the boson, and the field. And there’s some great analogies to describe how the Higgs boson would work. Do you have a favorite?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I do. I read this initially in Scientific America back in the ’90s. So, the way to think about the Higgs boson and the Higgs field is, if you’re trying to walk through a room and you’re a nobody – you have to mass – you just fly through the room because there’s nothing slowing you down. You have nothing dragging you. You have nothing connecting you. Zoom, you’re through the room. Now, if you have a few friends, you might get slowed down because they’re like, “Hey, how’s it going?”
Fraser Cain:
Right. Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
“Hey, how’s the trip?”
Fraser Cain:
“What do you think about this?” Yeah. “What do you think about this?”
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
I want you to meet this person.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And so, this is someone who has – or something that has a little bit of mass. They have a few bosons coupling them to the Higgs field, and this slows down their passage
Now, the more famous you are, or the more massive you are, the more you have dragging you down by coupling you to that field. And so, more massive objects have a stronger coupling. They have more Higgs bosons tying them to that Higgs scaler field. And so, there’s no direction to the field. It’s just everywhere all the time. And we all get stuck to it by these Higgs bosons. And I for one could do with a few fewer Higgs bosons.
Fraser Cain:
Right. But like Taylor Swift trying to move through that party would make no progress.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. And that is a massive particle.
Fraser Cain:
A very massive particle. Yeah. Yeah, that’s great.
So, he predicts the particle, predicts the field. But how did this get translated into what is one of the greatest scientific experiments in human history?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Well, this is a combination of really good promotion by another Nobel Prize winner, and also the entire field trying really hard to check all the boxes in the standard model trying to find all the things.
So, first, we have Leon Lederman, who won his Nobel Prize for work on neutrinos, who wrote a book that he intended to call the God – four-letter word I’m not going to say on air – particle. And his publisher was like, no. No, Leon, we cannot do that. And so, the God – four-letter word that I’m not going to say on air – particle became the book The God Particle.
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And poor Higgs was –
Fraser Cain:
But it was the God Damn Particle, right?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, now you’re gonna say the word on air that I –
Fraser Cain:
I’m gonna say it. Yeah, that’s fine.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Okay, fine. You do it.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, Leon Lederman was gonna name his book The God Damn Particle. His publisher was like, no. No, we cannot do that. And one of the reasons it was called that is because it was so frustrating to find. It’s such a massive particle.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Right. So, the name is not like its incredible purpose in the universe.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
No.
Fraser Cain:
It’s how frustrating it’s been to find this thing that the most powerful particle accelerators, which have been trying to find it, have failed because they don’t have enough energy.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
You don’t have the right tool to get to this stupid, illusive particle.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. And then, of course, because Leon Lederman had done that a lot of people were like, oh, we’re going to make this the most important particle ever because it is what gives the universe mass; and with mass, gravity can evolve all the things. And so, it’s not so much a backronym as a backroname, where they gave it all the import after it had been done by a publisher trying to –
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. But I think that because of the book, because of the popularity of the idea, that probably helped with keeping the funding turned on to make this happen. So, the idea that we need to build bigger and bigger and bigger particle accelerators had been around for a while. Here in the United States, we’ve been trying to build the Super Collider – Super Colliding Super –
Fraser Cain:
Superconducting Super Collider.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Thank you. In Texas. And then Congress canceled it after it had mostly been dug, after they had taken all of the land from the farmers via eminent domain. They sold the land to real estate people who built McMansions, and they actually filled in the tunnel instead of using it for geologic research, which had been proposed. So, that was just a hot mess. US was not going to find this particle.
And CERN was like, okay. We’re a multinational consortium. We have partners from nations that are all but at war with each other. And we’re still in the name of science going to use the wealth of all of these nations, the intellectual capabilities of all of these nations, to work together to build a accelerator capable of sending particles at higher and higher velocities and collecting them in these instruments, ATLAS being the key to finding the Higgs boson. And full disclosure, when I was a baby student at Michigan State University, I spent a summer weaving fiber for instruments for ATLAS.
Fraser Cain:
Oh, wow.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, my skin cells are probably somewhere in ATLAS.
Fraser Cain:
This is personal.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Yeah. So, I just listened to audio books all summer and attached fibers very carefully over and over, hundreds and hundreds of them. This is what undergraduates in physics do. But this is just an idea of how many members of the physics community, in the astronomy community have been part of building this.
There were thousands of students. There were hundreds of graduate students. There were probably hundreds of PhDs, just fewer hundreds, working on all levels of this experiment from the electronics, to the optics, to the control systems. It was a truly global endeavor to find the reason my bathroom scale makes me sad in the morning.
Fraser Cain:
Right. So, let’s talk about the experiment then. What was the Large Hadron Collider at CERN – what was sort of some of the key parts to this experiment?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, they needed to get a extremely large amount of energy, tens of electron volts, confined in the tiniest of volumes. And the reason they need to do this is so that energy could then turn into the ever-so-briefly-lived Higgs boson. So, Higgs bosons have a mean lifetime – and I have to look at my screen for this – of between 1.2 and 4.6 times 10 to the -22 seconds.
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, 0.0 – write that zero 21 times –
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
– 1.2 to 4.6.
Fraser Cain:
Right. That is a very tiny amount of time. A fraction of a fraction, of a fraction of a second.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. So, they not only needed to get 125 gigaelectron volts divided by C-squared, which is the crazy units that we use in particle physics, of energy confined in one small area; they also had to have instruments capable of measuring the trails made by the particles created in that energy combined in that small area, all at once.
And so, the way this was done was they were accelerating protons. They needed to get them going super, super fast. They needed to then make them go smash, as you do. And then one of the biggest features of ATLAS was layers upon layers of fiber optics of varying kinds, width, color sensitivities that would then be able to channel the energy through the photomultiplier tubes that could sense the light, the flickers of energy of these particles coming in and out of existence. And they did it.
What was amazing is there’d been hints that this was the correct energy. There’d been hints that things had previously been seen at Fermi National Lab when they were running some of their high-energy experiments. They had to turn off Fermi’s experiments while they were working on upgrading their things. Then they upgraded everything at CERN. CERN was the place that ultimately did the experiment.
And it’s hoped with the next generation of the CERN accelerator and all of its instruments that they’ll be able to see more than just a signal created by these things, but they’ll actually start to be able to measure more and more of their properties and hopefully be able to start doing things like prove once and for all that the supersymmetric particles are or aren’t there –
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
– and find any particles that may or may not be dark matter.
So, it’s not that they did CERN just to find the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson helped, and Leon Lederman’s book popularizing the Higgs boson really helped. But this is fundamental physics. This is what we do. We go, okay, we have a theory. The theory says all these particles are going to exist. We’re now going to make sure all those particles actually exist because if they don’t the theory is wrong.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And this was the last of the core particles that should be discoverable. There’s a graviton out there that we probably will never find, if it exists. But this was the last of the particles we knew we could find if we could just turn the energy up to 11.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Right. And there’s like a real beauty to that. I mean, was it 2012 –
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
– they announced the findings. But for a couple of years leading up to that, we knew that they were on the right track.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It was gonna work.
Fraser Cain:
They were finding with higher levels of – it was going to work. They had found it. It was really a matter of exactly trying to pin down the mass of this particle. But how did the physics community, and I guess how did Higgs – I mean, you mentioned earlier on he wiped away tears from his eyes.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
He cried.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. So, how did that sort of change his perspective on what he had originally proposed?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, he’s a shy human, so finding things like that wasn’t something I was able to do. He was the kind of person who showed up to these events, looked spectacularly happy in front of giant pictures of ATLAS. And then when people were like, I don’t understand. He just explained the physics.
This was a human being that, as near as I can tell from everything I read, his true joy came in understanding our universe, having the theory proven true, but then it wasn’t all about, oh, look at me. It was, hey, let me explain the science to you. My favorite description was he’s someone who’s shyness was overcome by explaining physics to others.
Fraser Cain:
That’s wonderful.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I wish I had met him. I really do.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah, that sounds amazing. So, I guess, what comes next? What do you think is his legacy for physics and the future of particle accelerators?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, he had some ideas on dark matter that will either get proven or disproven. But, mostly, he’s been retired and following along for the past few years. And his legacy is all the particle physicists who he inspired, who he taught, who are going to be the humans working to figure out what is dark matter, what is dark energy. He worked as a professor at the University of Edenborough. He got to be at the place he loved when he went hitchhiking. And he trained generations of students, and that in a lot of ways is the best legacy anyone could have, other than, of course, the Nobel Prize.
Fraser Cain:
I love the idea of an international physics community coming together to do this basic research work.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
On the one hand, the particle that interacts with a scaler field, that is the source of mass in the universe –
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
– it seems very esoteric. And, yet, it is this basic building block of us to understand better the true nature of the cosmos. And who knows if there will ever be practical use for it. But we do know that we have one less mystery out there.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And let this also be a lesson about history remembers the workers, the helpers. And this is a human who was one of three different collaborations who proposed what became the Higgs mechanism, the Higgs boson, and the Higgs field. And, well, pretty much everyone and everything refers to them as Higgs boson, Higgs mechanism, Higgs field. He was like, no. He called it the ABEGHHK’tH mechanism –
Fraser Cain:
Correct.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
– for Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and Hooft.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
He gave credit to everyone.
Fraser Cain:
Every time.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
What a gentleman.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, yeah. Be the helper.
Fraser Cain:
Thank you, Peter Higgs. And thank you, Pamela.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And thank you to all the people out there who make this show possible. We would not be here without you. And I regret to say the names for this week were not listed. So, I’m going to really, really hope that the names for April are good enough, and I’m going to read the April 3rd names. And I will make sure that everyone else who should’ve been read today, all of our $10.00-and-up – we break you across the month – people get acknowledged.
So, our $10.00 patrons whose names are going to be read are David, Everson, Michael Procha, Jon Thase, Berry Gowan, Steven Veit, Jordan Young, Jeanette Wink, Nanoflips, Andrew Poelstra, [inaudible] [00:27:04], Brian Cagle, David Truog, Gerhard Schwarzer, David, Buzz Parsec, Laura Kittleson, Robert Palsma, Les Howard, Jack Mudge, Joe Hollstein, Alexis, Gordon Dewis, Richard Drumm, Adam Annis-Brown, Frank Tippin, Greg Davis, William Andrews, and Gold.
And if you too would like to hear me stumble horribly over your name and be extremely grateful for you while doing it, join at the $10.00-and-up level. Thank you, all, so much.
Fraser Cain:
All right. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next week.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Bye-bye.