Dr Peter Higgs: God's particle

BACKSTAGE

In 1966, an unknown 36-year-old physicist from Edinburgh University presented a two-page paper at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study. An earlier one-page version had been rejected by CERN. So Dr Peter Higgs added a few paragraphs worth of calculations.

The implications were staggering. Higgs was suggesting mass did not exist at the Big Bang and it was imparted through the influence of a mysterious particle. His calculations also implied that an invisible, undetectable force field stretched across the universe and dictated the nature of mass and matter.

Despite the counter-intuitive assertions, the resident experts in Princeton could not fault his logic. A couple of Belgian scientists, Robert Brout and François Englert had also independently come to much the same conclusions.

Higgs remained unknown to the world at large. But his paper set off a series of frantic experiments and is considered one of the key hypotheses of modern particle physics. Different scientific establishments spent vast sums to build bigger and better particle accelerators in the hopes of finding the elusive particle.

Officially it is known as the Higgs Boson though Higgs admits that Brout and Englert both deserve to be included in the nomenclature. In physics jargon, it is usually referred to as the “God particle”, much to the dismay of Higgs, who is a staunch atheist.

Ironically, given that CERN rejected the original paper, the Large Hadron Collider project may succeed in finally nailing it down. If so, Higgs, Brout and Englert are all more or less guaranteed the Nobel Prize. Higgs says he’s keeping a bottle of champagne handy, though it would take at least three years for the LHC data to offer proof, one way or another.

Although Higgs is highly respected in his field, not everyone believes the Higgs Boson exists. Superstar physicist Steven Hawking has reiterated several times that he doesn’t think the Higgs Boson exists and has taken a $100 bet to that effect. Higgs and Hawking had a recent public spat with Higgs saying, “I am very doubtful about Steven’s calculations. Frankly I don’t think they are good enough”.

Higgs was born in Newcastle in 1929. He missed most of his early schooling as a result of a tendency to serious asthma. At Cotham Grammar School in Bristol, Higgs was inspired to discover that the most famous alumni was Nobel prize-winning physicist and founding father of quantum mechanics, Paul Dirac. Dirac, like Hawking and Newton, was Lucasian Professor at Cambridge.

Higgs deliberately avoided Oxbridge choosing to go to King’s College, London instead. Like many theoretical physicists, he was reputedly clumsy in the lab. In his early 30s, Higgs moved to Edinburgh University, where he became interested in the subject of mass and in the apparent paradox that fundamental particles like quarks and photons are mass-less. In 1964, he had the first insight that led to the paper. He wrote it up while on a disastrously rained out holiday.

Higgs has now been retired almost 20 years and says he struggles to keep up with new advances because he has withdrawn from the field. At one level, the shy, retiring academic is dreading the inevitable spotlight if the Higgs Boson is found. At another, he confessed in a recent lecture that he would be “rather relieved”.