The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

This is a 1993 popular science book by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi. The book provides a brief history of particle physics, starting with the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Democritus, and continuing through Isaac Newton, Roger J. Boscovich, Michael Faraday, and Ernest Rutherford and quantum physics in the 20th century.[1][2][3][4] Lederman said he gave the Higgs boson the nickname "The God Particle" because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive,"[5][6][7] but added that a second reason was because "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."[5][8] List of Chapters Chapter 1: The Invisible Soccer Ball: This chapter uses a metaphor of a soccer game with an invisible ball to depict the process by which the existence of particles are deduced.[9] Also, in this chapter Dr. Lederman gives a brief background story of what led him to particle physics.[10] Chapter 2: The First Particle Physicist: In a fictional dream, Dr. Lederman meets Democritus, an ancient Greek philosopher who lived just during the Classical Greek Civilization and has a conversation (a Socratic dialogue) with him.[11] Chapter 3: Looking For The Atom: The Mechanics: This chapter covers Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton.[12] Chapter 4: Still Looking for the Atom: Chemists and Electricians: This chapter covers physicists from the 18th century onward including J.J. Thomson, John Dalton, and Dmitri Mendeleev (18341907).[13] Chapter 5: The Naked Atom: This chapter paints a picture of the shift from classical physics to the birth and development of quantum mechanics.[14] Chapter 6: Accelerators: They Smash Atoms, Dont They?: Covers the development of particle accelerators.[15] Chapter 7: A-tom!: The book uses the word "A-tom" to refer to Democritus' fundamental, uncuttable particle. This chapter covers the discovery of the fundamental particles of the Standard Model.[16] Chapter 8: The God Particle At Last: Covers spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs boson.[17] Chapter 9: Inner Space, Outer Space, and the Time Before Time: Looks at astrophysics and describes the evidence for the big bang.[18]

Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe

By DENNIS OVERBYE ASPEN, Colo. Signaling a likely end to one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science, physicists said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a key to understanding why there is diversity and life in the universe.

Like Omar Sharif materializing out of the shimmering desert as a man on a camel in Lawrence of Arabia, the elusive boson has been coming slowly into view since last winter, as the first signals of its existence grew until they practically jumped off the chart. I think we have it, said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, the multinational research center headquartered in Geneva. The agency is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the immense particle accelerator that produced the new data by colliding protons. The findings were announced by two separate teams. Dr. Heuer called the discovery a historic milestone. He and others said that it was too soon to know for sure, however, whether the new particle is the one predicted by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half-century. The particle is predicted to imbue elementary particles with mass. It may be an impostor as yet unknown to physics, perhaps the first of many particles yet to be discovered. That possibility is particularly exciting to physicists, as it could point the way to new, deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality. For now, some physicists are simply calling it a Higgslike particle. Its something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, said Joe Incandela, a physicist of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a spokesman for one of the two groups reporting new data on Wednesday. Here at the Aspen Center for Physics, a retreat for scientists, bleary-eyed physicists drank Champagne in the wee hours as word arrived via Webcast from CERN. It was a scene duplicated in Melbourne, Australia, where physicists had gathered for a major conference, as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, Princeton, New York, London and beyond everywhere that members of a curious species have dedicated their lives and fortunes to the search for their origins in a dark universe. In Geneva, 1,000 people stood in line all night to get into an auditorium at CERN, where some attendees noted a rockconcert ambience. Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh theorist for whom the boson is named, entered the meeting to a sustained ovation. Confirmation of the Higgs boson or something very much like it would constitute a rendezvous with destiny for a generation of physicists who have believed in the boson for half a century without ever seeing it. The finding affirms a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry. According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous. Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.

Physicists said that they would probably be studying the new particle for years. Any deviations from the simplest version predicted by current theory and there are hints of some already could begin to answer questions left hanging by the Standard Model. For example, what is the dark matter that provides the gravitational scaffolding of galaxies? And why is the universe made of matter instead of antimatter? If the boson really is not acting standard, then that will imply that there is more to the story more particles, maybe more forces around the corner, Neal Weiner, a theorist at New York University, wrote in an e -mail. What that would be is anyones guess at the moment. Wednesdays announcement was also an impressive opening act for the Large Hadron Collider, the worlds biggest physics machine, which cost $10 billion to build and began operating only two years ago. It is still running at only halfpower. Physicists had been icing the Champagne ever since last December. Two teams of about 3,000 physicists each one named Atlas, led by Fabiola Gianotti, and the other CMS, led by Dr. Incandela operate giant detectors in the collider, sorting the debris from the primordial fireballs left after proton collisions. Last winter, they both reported hints of the same particle. They were not able, however, to rule out the possibility that it was a statistical fluke. Since then, the collider has more than doubled the number of collisions it has recorded. The results announced Wednesday capped two weeks of feverish speculation and Internet buzz as the physicists, who had been sworn to secrecy, did a breakneck analysis of about 800 trillion proton-proton collisions over the last two years. Up until last weekend, physicists at the agency were saying that they themselves did not know what the outcome would be. Expectations soared when it was learned that the five surviving originators of the Higgs boson theory had been invited to the CERN news conference. The December signal was no fluke, the scientists said Wednesday. The new particle has a mass of about 125.3 billion electron volts, as measured by the CMS group, and 126 billion according to Atlas. Both groups said that the likelihood that their signal was a result of a chance fluctuation was less than one chance in 3.5 million, five sigma, which is the gold standard in physics for a discovery. On that basis, Dr. Heuer said that he had decided only on Tuesday afternoon to call the Higgs result a discovery. He said, I know the science, and as director general I can stick out my neck. Dr. Incandelas and Dr. Gianottis presentations were repeatedly interrupted by applause as they showed slide after slide of data presented in graphs with bumps rising like mountains from the sea. Dr. Gianotti noted that the mass of the putative Higgs, apparently one of the heaviest subatomic particles, made it easy to study its many behaviors. Thanks, nature, she said.

Gerald Guralnik, one of the founders of the Higgs theory, said he was glad to be at a physics meeting where there is applause, like a football game. Asked to comment after the announcements, Dr. Higgs seemed overwhelmed. For me, its really an incredible thing thats happened in my lifetime, he said. Dr. Higgs was one of six physicists, working in three independent groups, who in 1964 invented what came to be known as the Higgs field. The others were Tom Kibble of Imperial College, London; Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester; Dr. Guralnik of Brown University; and Franois Englert and Robert Brout, both of Universit Libre de Bruxelles. One implication of their theory was that this cosmic molasses, normally invisible, would produce its own quantum particle if hit hard enough with the right amount of energy. The particle would be fragile and fall apart within a millionth of a second in a dozen possible ways, depending upon its own mass. Unfortunately, the theory did not describe how much this particle should weigh, which is what made it so hard to find, eluding researchers at a succession of particle accelerators, including the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN, which closed down in 2000, and the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., which shut down last year. Along the way the Higgs boson achieved a notoriety rare in abstract physics. To the eternal dismay of his colleagues, Leon Lederman, the former director of Fermilab, called it the God particle, in his book of the same name, written w ith Dick Teresi. (He later said that he had wanted to call it the goddamn particle.) Finding the missing boson was one of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider. Both Dr. Heuer and Dr. Gianotti said they had not expected the search to succeed so quickly. So far, the physicists admit, they know little about their new boson. The CERN results are mostly based on measurements of two or three of the dozen different ways, or channels, by which a Higgs boson could be produced and then decay. There are hints, but only hints so far, that some of the channels are overproducing the boson while others might be underproducing it, clues that maybe there is more at work here than the Standard Model would predict. This could be the first in a ring of discoveries, said Guido Tonelli of CERN. In an e-mail, Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who works with the CMS team of physicists, said: I personally do not want it to be standard model anything I dont want it to be simple or symmetric or as predicted. I want us all to have been dealt a complex hand that will send me (and all of us) in a (good) loop for a long time. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said: Its a triumphant day for fundamental physics. Now some fun begins.

Why the Higgs Boson Matters

By STEVEN WEINBERG The July 4 announcement that the Higgs boson had been discovered at the CERN laboratory in Geneva made news around the world. Why all the fuss? New discoveries of elementary particles have been made from time to time without attracting all this attention. It is often said that this particle provides the crucial clue to how all the other elementary particles get their masses. True enough, but this takes some explanation. We have a well-tested theory of elementary particles and the forces that they exert on each other, known as the Standard Model. A central feature of the Standard Model is a symmetry between two of these forces: the electromagnetic force, and the less familiar weak nuclear force, which provides the first step in the chain of reactions that gives the sun its energy. The symmetry means that the particles carrying these forces enter into the equations of the theory in essentially the same way. You could interchange the photon, the particle of light that carries the electromagnetic force, with some combination of the W and Z particles that carry the weak nuclear force, and the equations would be unchanged. If nothing intervened to break this symmetry, the W and Z, like the photon, would have no mass. In fact, all other elementary particles would also be massless. But of course, most elementary particles are not massless. For instance, unlike the massless photon, the W and Z particles have nearly 100 times the mass of a hydrogen atom. Since the early 1960s it has been known that it is possible for symmetries to be exact properties of the equations of a theory and yet not respected by observable physical quantities, like the values of particle masses. The consequences of such symmetry breaking were worked out in 1964 by Robert Brout and Franois Englert; by Peter Higgs; and by Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble, for a general class of theories that contain force-carrying particles, like the photon. In 1967-8 the late Abdus Salam and I independently used this mathematics in formulating a specific theory, the modern unified theory of weak and electromagnetic forces that became part of the Standard Model. This theory predicted the masses of the W and Z particles, which were verified when these particles were discovered at CERN in 1983-84. But just what is it that breaks the electroweak symmetry and thereby gives elementary particles their masses? Salam and I assumed that the culprit is what are called scalar fields, which pervade all space. This is like what happens in a magnet: Even though the equations describing iron atoms dont distinguish one direction in space from another, any magnetic field produced by the atoms will point in just one way. The symmetry-breaking fields in the Standard Model do not mark out directions in space instead, they distinguish the weak from the electromagnetic forces, and give elementary particles their masses. Just as a magnetic field appears in iron when it cools and solidifies, these scalar fields appeared as the early universe expanded and cooled. This is where the Higgs boson comes in. The illustrative models studied in most of the papers on symmetry breaking from 1960 to 1964 had introduced scalar fields to break the symmetries, and had typically found that some of these fields would show up as massive particles, bundles of the energy of the fields. Likewise, Salam and I in 1967-68 found that one of the four scalar fields we introduced to break the electroweak symmetry would appear as a new kind of electrically neutral unstable particle. This is the Higgs boson, which may now have been discovered, verifying the Standard Models account of how the elementary particles get their masses.

There seems no doubt that a new electrically neutral, unstable particle had been discovered, but is it the Higgs boson? All of the properties of the Higgs boson except its mass were predicted in the 1967-8 electroweak theory, and since the mass of the new particle has been measured, we can now calculate the probabilities for the various ways that it can decay. So far, only a few decay modes have been observed, and though the new particle seems to decay like a Higgs boson, more must be done to pin this down. Also, if the new particle is the Higgs boson, it would have to be like a knuckleball in baseball; unlike all other known elementary particles, it would have no spin. This too must be tested. These are the cautious words you would expect to hear from a prudent physicist. But I have been waiting for the discovery of the Higgs boson since 1967, and its hard for me now to doubt that it has been found. So what? Even if the particle is the Higgs boson, it is not going to be used to cure diseases or improve technology. This discovery simply fills a gap in our understanding of the laws of nature that govern all matter, and throws light on what was going on in the early universe. Its wonderful that many people do care about this sort of science, and regard it as a credit to our civilization. Of course not everyone feels this way, and even those who do have to ask whether learning the laws of nature is worth the billions of dollars it costs to build particle accelerators. This question is going to come up again, since our present Standard Model is certainly not the end of the story. It leaves out gravitation; it does not explain the particular values of the masses of quarks and electrons and other particles; and none of its particles can account for the dark matter that astronomers tell us makes up five-sixths of the mass of the universe. You can count on physicists to ask their governments for the facilities they need to grapple with these problems. A case can be made for this sort of spending, even to those who dont care about learning the laws of nature. Exploring the outer frontier of our knowledge of nature is in one respect like war: It pushes modern technology to its limits, often yielding new technology of great practical importance. For instance, the new particle was produced at CERN in collisions of protons that occur at a rate of over a hundred million collisions per second. To analyze the flood of data produced by all these collisions requires real time computing of unmatched power. Also, before the protons collide, they are accelerated to an energy over 3,000 times larger than the energy contained in their own masses while they go many times around a 27-kilometer circular tunnel. To keep them in their tracks requires enormously strong superconducting magnets, cooled by the worlds largest source of liquid helium. In previous work at CERN, elementary particle physicists developed a method of sharing data that has become the World Wide Web. On a longer time scale, the advance of technology will reflect the coherent picture of nature we are now assembling. At the end of the 19th century physicists in England were exploring the properties of electric currents passing through a near vacuum. Although this was pure science, it led to our knowledge of the electron, without which a large part of todays technology would be impossible. If these physicists had limited themselves to work of obvious practical importance, they would have been studying the behavior of steam boilers. Steven Weinberg is a professor in the physics and astronomy departments at the University of Texas at Austin, and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic forces.

What is the Higgs boson and why is it important?

Nick Thompson, CNN (CNN) -- Scientists say they are almost certain they have proven the existence of the Higgs boson -- a never-before-seen subatomic particle long thought to be a fundamental building block of the universe. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider under the Alps are unveiling their latest results on the so-called "God particle" at an eagerly awaited seminar at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Experts say finding the elusive particle would rank as one of the top scientific achievements of the past 50 years. What is the Higgs boson? The Standard Model of particle physics lays out the basics of how elementary particles and forces interact in the universe. But the theory crucially fails to explain how particles actually get their mass. Speaking with CERN's Director-General The 'God particle': Have we found it? The Number: Search for the God Particle Particles, or bits of matter, range in size and can be larger or smaller than atoms. Electrons, protons and neutrons, for instance, are the subatomic particles that make up an atom. Scientists believe that the Higgs boson is the particle that gives all matter its mass. Read more: The woman at the edge of physics Experts know that elementary particles like quarks and electrons are the foundation upon which all matter in the universe is built. They believe the elusive Higgs boson gives the particles mass and fills in one of the key holes in modern physics. How does the Higgs boson work? The Higgs boson is part of a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s to explain how particles obtain mass. The theory proposes that a so-called Higgs energy field exists everywhere in the universe. As particles zoom around in this field, they interact with and attract Higgs bosons, which cluster around the particles in varying numbers. Higgs boson is the last missing piece of our current understanding of the most fundamental nature of the universe. Physicist Martin Archer Imagine the universe like a party. Relatively unknown guests at the party can pass quickly through the room unnoticed; more popular guests will attract groups of people (the Higgs bosons) who will then slow their movement through the room. The speed of particles moving through the Higgs field works much in the same way. Certain particles will attract larger clusters of Higgs bosons -- and the more Higgs bosons a particle attracts, the greater its mass will be. Why is finding the Higgs boson so important? While finding the Higgs boson won't tell us everything we need to know about how the universe works, it will fill in a huge hole in the Standard Model that has existed for more than 50 years, according to experts. "The Higgs boson is the last missing piece of our current understanding of the most fundamental nature of the universe," Martin Archer, a physicist at Imperial College in London, told CNN.

"Only now with the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] are we able to really tick that box off and say 'This is how the universe works, or at least we think it does'." "It's not the be all and end all -- but in terms of what can we say practically about the world and how the world is, it actually tells us a lot." Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, added that finding evidence of the Higgs boson would be a "very wonderful success of science and of people for four centuries." Why is the Higgs boson called the "God particle?" The popular nickname for the elusive particle was created for the title of a book by Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman -- reportedly against his will, as Lederman has said he wanted to call it the "Goddamn Particle" because "nobody could find the thing." "'God particle' is a nickname I don't really like," says Archer. "It's nothing to do with religion -- the only (theoretical) similarity is you're seeing something that's a field that's everywhere, in all spaces." How are scientists searching for the Higgs boson? For the past eighteen months scientists have searched for the Higgs boson by smashing protons together at high energy in the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. If we don't see [Higgs], it means the universe is more complicated than we thought. Physicist Martin Archer Inside the LHC, which is located 328 feet underground in a 17-mile tunnel and is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, high speed proton collisions generate a range of even smaller particles that scientists sift through in search of a signal in the data suggesting the existence of the Higgs boson. "You're just hoping that somewhere in these collisions that you see something ... some sort of a statistical bump," says Archer. If Higgs bosons exist, they are elusive, popping up and then disappearing again quickly. It means, says Archer, that scientists at the LHC will only be able to observe their decaying remnants. It has taken years for scientists to narrow down the range of mass in which they believed the Higgs boson could exist -but during the past year a statistical bump suggests they're on the right track. "Now they're starting to get a bump, the scientists should be able to get that result more and more," says Archer. What if scientists don't find the Higgs boson? The general consensus among physics academics is that the Higgs field and boson exists, according to Archer. "It just makes sense within the framework that we've got everything set up in, given that everything else that we can describe and we can see seems to be described in this simple way," says Archer. Nearly every scientist believes that the Large Hadron Collider will either prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson once and for all -- so if the LHC doesn't find it, it doesn't exist, experts say. Martin Archer believes a failure to find the Higgs boson would be even more exciting than discovering the elusive particle. "If we don't see it, it actually means that the universe at the most fundamental level is more complicated than we thought," says Archer, "and therefore maybe the way we've been attacking physics isn't right." Higgs boson is like... a Justin Bieber fan?