In places, however, I found the explanations a little baffling: for instance, the description of the unobservable “gauge fields” that underpin our reality left me puzzled – and I have a background in physics. Lederman and Hill’s book is a great read and a mine of stuff you may not know about the standard model of particle physics and about the Higgs. But then, this fact has been omitted by almost all particle physicists in their eagerness to big up the Higgs to the media. The lion’s share – 99 per cent – comes from the strong nuclear force and has nothing whatsoever to do with the weakly interacting Higgs. Mind you, three-quarters of the way through, Lederman and Hill do belatedly admit, with a sheepish apology, that the Higgs explains only a minuscule part of mass. And it is worth the price of the book alone. In fact, that takes a whopping 125 gigaelectronvolts to be precise – which is why nothing less than the $9 billion LHC could do it.Īll of this is about as far from the standard cocktail party description of how the Higgs generates mass as it is possible to get. And it is the drag exerted on a muon as it continually has to interact with Higgs bosons in the vacuum that endows it with mass.īut while photons are easy to pluck from the electromagnetic field, Higgs bosons are immensely hard to pull from their field. Just like the photons that make up an electromagnetic field, the bosons of the Higgs field like to be with their mates, crowding the vacuum that fills the universe. Hey presto, the recipe for the Higgs.Īccording to Lederman and Hill, the defining characteristic of bosons is their gregariousness. And it cannot add quantum “spin”, so it must have zero spin, making it a boson. It cannot add electric charge, so it must have zero electric charge. The particle is not obvious so it must be short-lived, which in quantum theory is synonymous with being massive. Hence the left-right switch must be mediated by another particle that takes away the weak charge. So where does the Higgs come in? In switching from the left to the right form, a muon must destroy its “weak charge”, which is as impossible as destroying the ordinary electric charge. The inference is that this oscillation is what gives a muon its mass. But all that has happened to it is that the flickering between left and right forms has stopped. Since a photon has no rest mass, running with the photon analogy, neither would the superfast muon. A particle that experiences no passage of time is a photon, so the muon would appear like a photon. If, however, the muon could be boosted to the speed of light, its time would slow to a standstill, as predicted by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Not by a long chalk.According to Lederman and Hill, a subatomic particle such as a muon, which feels the weak nuclear force, flickers back and forth between a right and a left corkscrewing form (the flicker is known as Z itterbewegung). Mass, in a nutshell, is not what you think it is. And this is a truly fascinating story, well told. It’s a bold plan, and well argued, but the real meat of Beyond the God Particle is the Higgs boson itself and its raison d’être. Lederman and Hill suggest an American “Project X” to coincide with this, to look for ultra-rare, low-energy processes that may reveal a new fundamental physics. In 2015, the LHC will start operating at even higher energies. As a consequence, and ironically, they presented their collective funding governments with a far lower total bill for the enterprise.Īlthough Lederman and Hill mourn the SSC, they seem to have accepted that European-style international collaborations with their pooled financial resources are the sensible way forward for particle physics.Įven so, they want to see the US punching its weight in particle physics again. In short, European scientists displayed the kind of daring, can-do spirit formerly seen in American scientists of the Apollo moon-shot era. Confining a superfast beam to such a small particle racetrack could be achieved only with superconducting magnets of such power that they were pure science fiction at the time the LHC was proposed. The plan for the SSC was to excavate a vast circular tunnel in Waxahachie, Texas, while the LHC plan proposed reusing an existing subterranean ring. But while the US Congress may well have lacked what Lederman and Hill call “leadership cojones”, it is perhaps unfair to blame Congress entirely.
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