Fabiola Gianotti...four years and the Higgs boson

"Q&A with Fabiola Gianotti, Higgs hunter"

Symmetry sits down with Fabiola Gianotti, who recently finished an eventful four years as spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

by

Lori Ann White

April 19th, 2013

Symmetry

Physicist Fabiola Gianotti, one of the two experiment leaders who announced the discovery of a Higgs-like particle last summer, recently stopped by Stanford University to deliver the physics department’s annual Hofstadter Lectures. Symmetry writer Lori Ann White took the opportunity to interview Gianotti about her time as spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment; her nomination to be Time magazine’s 2012 Person of the Year; the future of the Large Hadron Collider; and, of course, Gianotti’s use of the oft-maligned Comic Sans font.

S: How is life different now that you've finished your term as ATLAS spokesperson?

FG: It's a different life (laughs). Of course the four years as spokesperson were unique—a great time, a very special scientific and human adventure. Unforgettable.

Now I am back to doing more hands-on work, which is different but is equally interesting and stimulating. I like my “new life.” I feel pretty much like a post-doc, and I am working with many young people.

S: What are your impressions of your time as spokesperson now?

FG: I'm extremely grateful to the ATLAS collaboration for giving me such an important and prestigious opportunity. The past four years have been very intense for the whole LHC community—accelerator, experiments, computing—very demanding, every day a new challenge. For sure we didn’t get bored!

The huge number of satisfactions and accomplishments since the LHC started operation at the end of 2009 reward decades of hard work by the community. People should keep in mind that the Higgs boson was not discovered in a few months.

From a more personal point of view, it was for me very enriching to work with so many competent, motivated, enthusiastic and dedicated ATLAS colleagues, in particular the young people. There is a very strong team spirit in ATLAS, which has allowed us to face in the best way difficulties and challenges and savor together several outstanding accomplishments.  
 
S: What do you consider your best accomplishment as spokesperson?

FG: Frankly, I don’t know. I have tried to do my best for the experiment as every other ATLAS colleague. What we accomplished is the result of this collective work, over the years.

S: Do you feel your nomination for Time magazine’s Person of the Year is an indication that the public doesn't understand how collaborations work?

FG: All the people who have contributed to the LHC should have been runners-up for Time’s Person of the Year. But I guess this would have been unpractical.

I am obviously honored to have been selected by Time, but I consider myself to be there as a representative of a much bigger community, so I share this honor with my ATLAS and CMS colleagues, as well as the LHC accelerator team and all the people who have been working on the LHC project over the years.

I think it's positive that Time magazine has chosen a representative from science and research as one of the runners-up. It’s a very good demonstration that society values knowledge.
 
S: How has the discovery of the Higgs changed your life?

FG: It has changed it in that I have now much stronger relationships with people outside our field. The discovery of the Higgs boson has raised a big interest in society. I've had the chance to give a few public lectures since the 4th of July. At each time, the attendance is huge, and people ask very good questions that indicate their genuine interest and that they have prepared themselves. I also receive a huge number of mails from young people, in particular teenagers and undergrad students, who would like to know more about the Higgs boson, the LHC, how to become a scientist, etc. It's really very nice to see how much people are interested in fundamental knowledge.

S: I have to ask. Why do you use Comic Sans in your slides?

FG: Because I like it. It's so cute. As you see, I didn't change it [for the Hofstadter Lectures]. I find it a sweet and pleasant font.
 
S: What do you think of the reactions to your use of the font?

FG: (laughs) I was amazed. It made such a big splash. I learned that a person in the UK is running a campaign to rename Comic Sans to Comic CERN.

S: What future news do you anticipate coming out of the LHC experiments?

FG: Now that we have discovered a new particle, we are going to measure it in detail, so I expect many more nice results about the Higgs boson to come out in the next months.

For the rest, I have no idea. I am serious. The LHC has been conceived and built to address a long list of questions, of which the existence of the Higgs boson is only one. There are many others: the composition of dark matter, the origin of the matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe, the unification of forces, etc.

So we will continue to work and hopefully we will be able to solve, at least partially, some of these issues. We will see what surprise nature has set aside for us.

I think the best reward will be to find something totally unexpected. So I would say I don't know today what future news to anticipate. But I hope it will be something very intriguing.

Fabiola Gianotti [Wikipedia]

Change the name?...Higgs boson

"Scientists want Higgs boson to be renamed"

Arpril 21st, 2013

The Hindu Business Line

 What’s in a name? A lot — at least as far as the Higgs boson is concerned.

Some leading scientists want the elusive God particle, called Higgs boson after its discoverer Peter Higgs, to be renamed in order to also credit the other researchers involved in its discovery.

Scientists argue that Higgs, the genial but reclusive Edinburgh University physicist who predicted the existence of the ‘God particle’ in a 1964 paper, was just one of six researchers involved. The others should also be credited, they say.

A variety of names have been suggested as replacements.

One idea proposed is to call it the Brout-Englert-Higgs, or BEH, particle, to reflect the roles of Belgian physicists Robert Brout and Francois Englert, whose paper on the topic came out just before that of Higgs, The Sunday Times reported.

Another is to rename it the BEHGHK (pronounced Berk) particle, with the extra letters representing Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble, based at Imperial College London, whose joint paper followed Higgs’s by a few weeks.

“It should not be called the Higgs. The rest of us are fighting not just for our ego but for our place in the annals of physics,” Hagen said.

The debate has raised tensions within the physics community. Last month, at a conference organised by The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), speakers were told not to use that name but instead refer to the BEH boson.

The programme for the meeting at Moriond, in France, also referred to it as the SM Scalar boson.

“Higgs is the wrong name for this particle because the paper where the mechanism and structure was first set out was ours,” said Englert, who chaired the session at which the particle was discussed.

“Maybe the name should not matter but it is not pleasant if you have done important work to be ignored. What’s more, Brout was my friend and should not be forgotten,” Englert said.

Others scientists are not so concerned.

“The name Higgs boson has been in common use for 40 years and it is silly to try to change it. There is no chance that any of the longer names on offer will ever be in everyday use.

They are just too clumsy,” Kibble, now emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College, said.

Higgs, 83, could not be contacted, the report said.

We haven't wet ourselves yet--the Higgs Boson

"This Just in: Higgs Boson Still Boring"

by

Adam Mann

March 6th, 2013

Wired

Physicists from around the world are convening this week and next in Italy at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference to discuss the latest in particle physics and cosmology. Scientists with the main Higgs-searching experiments, ATLAS and CMS, presented their most recent data and analysis on March 6. Aside from some tantalizing but tenuous hints, they showed few surprises.

“The new particle discovered at CERN last year is looking more and more like a Higgs boson,” wrote spokesman James Gillies in an update on CERN’s website. “However, more analysis is still required before a definitive statement can be made.”
The long-sought Higgs boson was the only missing piece in the Standard Model, which explains how all known particles and forces interact. Physicists with the LHC continue to be extremely cautious about calling the particle they found in July the Higgs boson. That’s because not all of the new particle’s characteristics have been fully analyzed, and it could yet turn out to be something unexpected.

But all information suggests that the Higgs-like boson spotted last year with a mass of 125 gigaelectron volts (GeV) — roughly 125 times heavier than a proton – is the actual real-life Higgs boson.

The main property that scientists are now probing is the particle’s spin, a quantum mechanical characteristic of all subatomic particles that determines how they intermingle with other particles. The Higgs-like boson appears to have a spin of zero, exactly what was predicted beforehand, though a spin of two can’t yet be ruled out. A spin of two would indicate that what scientists found was a new particle, an exciting scenario that would likely tell physicists something about the nature of gravity. But this seems less and less likely.

There are some interesting hints in the data already reported. ATLAS has seen an excess in a particular decay of the Higgs-like particle (to two photons) that might indicate exotic new physics. The excess had been noticed in previous data and it was thought it might disappear with further analysis. But it continues to show up. The result isn’t statistically significant enough to be considered a discovery but it is intriguing that it hasn’t gone away, said theoretical physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard University.

“I think the news so far has been as interesting as it could be, given what we knew already,” she said.

Other physicists haven’t exactly been thrilled by the news from Moriond.

“Big analysis of the new data on the Higgs boson, and – it’s looking pretty vanilla,” tweeted cosmologist Sean Carroll of CalTech.

“All in all, the story is that this is looking very much like a garden variety SM [Standard Model] Higgs,” wrote mathematician Peter Woit of Columbia University on his blog, Not Even Wrong. “The experiments will continue working on improving their analyses of this data, but it seems unlikely that the picture will change much.”

The situation is almost the exact opposite of the excitement and frenzy in July, when CERN physicists made a grand announcement about finding a particle that could very well be the Higgs boson. Back then the discovery was preceded by excited rumors, leaked videos, and great interest among the particle physics community and laymen alike.

Now some physicists are getting a bit nervous that no new particles have turned up at the LHC. In particular, scientists were hoping for a signature of a theory known as supersymmetry, which pairs all known particles with a heavier but nearly identical partner, of which there is still no clear evidence. Supersymmetry has been the favorite way to solve several problems in the Standard Model among particle physicists and is now starting to see more scrutiny as evidence remains scarce.

But many in the field remain hopeful that something will turn up when the LHC comes back online in late 2014. Then, it will be smashing protons together at much higher energies and could conceivably uncover new exotic physics.

Importance of the Higgs Boson...probably not much in technology, but something more profound

The Higgs Boson "...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."--Steven Weinberg

"Why the Higgs Boson Matters"

by

Steven Weinberg

July 13th, 2012

The New York Times

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 François 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 don’t 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 Model’s 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, it 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 don’t 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 world’s 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 today’s 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.]

Don't forget 'em...India's scientists and the Higgs boson

"India's silent scientists"

by

Arun Ram

July 8th, 2012

The Times of India

As the world celebrates the Higgs part of the God particle, the Bose part of the boson lies largely forgotten. S N Bose is not the only Indian to fade into obscurity. Sunday Times looks at three others, who made outstanding contributions to science, but never got their due.

Last week's discovery of a particle which could most likely be Higgs boson may not change the way you play golf, but it may let you understand better the creation of the universe, its minuscule components and its all-pervading vastness. And, if you have an abiding interest in the interface of science and everyday life, it may as well tell you why you missed the 18th hole.

So, it wasn't surprising that some 8,000 scientists and students from 60 countries were peering at a maze of mathematical projections at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (Cern) near Geneva to catch a glimpse of what they hate to call the God particle. As millions of protons travelled almost at the speed of light through a 27 km circular tunnel 100 metres below the Franco-Swiss border last week, the world held its breath. But, the scientists wouldn't say if they have found it. Finally, on June 3, there was a give away: Peter Higgs, the English theoretical physicist who predicted the existence such a particle in the early 1960s was invited to a conference near Geneva , where the announcement was to be made the next day.

We know the Higgs part of the elusive particle, but the Bose part of it remains in relative obscurity . Boson, one of the two fundamental subatomic components of particle physics - the other being fermion - was named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974 ). Bose, who worked with Albert Einstein to come up with the Bose-Einstein statistics and the Bose-Einstein condensate theory, was never nominated for the Nobel. In fact, it was out of Einstein's personal interest in Bose's work that saw much of his work being noted, after Bose sent his papers to Einstein who translated them into German and got them published in scientific journals.

Thanks to a few media reports on Bose in the wake of the Higgs boson discovery, the great man is being introduced to a vast number of Indians 38 years after his death. But, there are several Indian scientists, great in their own ways, who remain unknown to the layman and ignored by the scientific fraternity and the governments. Ask any scientist who acknowledges original research to give a list of Indians who should have got a Nobel Prize, and you will find the name G N Ramachandran (1922- 2001) there. Though trained as a physicist, Ramachandran's greatest contributions were to biology, where he formulated the 'Ramachandran plots' which every biophysicist uses while studying proteins. His triplehelix structure of collagen is a classic discovery worth a Nobel. 'History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization' says Ramachandran's lesser known contribution was to three-dimensional image reconstruction , which redefined the way we look inside the human body without cutting it open. Some, like P M Bhargava, founder director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, believe Ramachandran should be considered the father of NMR and CT scan, though some others took credit for it. "Ramachandran was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society after some of us worked hard for it. He never asked for it," says Bhargava . "He was neither elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, nor nominated for a Nobel Prize which he richly deserved."

Ramachandran died in 2001 without much international recognition; several other silently continue to do path-breaking research, refusing to blow their own trumpets. E Premkumar Reddy, for one. Now the director of experimental cancer therapeutics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, Reddy has made seminal discoveries of oncogenes that gave a clear understanding of the molecular basis of cancer. Though he has lived and worked for more than 40 years in the US, he was never elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the hall of scientific fame in the US. Recognition may come to him as a cancer drug that took shape from his research goes into phase III trials.

Reddy, like several other silent toilers of science, says he has no regrets, though he believes that some scientists get ahead through PR. "Becoming a member of National Academy not only requires a major contribution to science, but also a certain amount of lobbying. I did not care to spend my time lobbying since I felt I could use my time and energy for a better cause," he says.

Lobbyism prevails because there is a lack of objective assessment of scientific work in India, feels Lalji Singh, who developed a new technique of DNA fingerprinting which has applications in forensics, parent determination and even resurrection of extinct species. Singh, 65, who served as the director of CCMB, Hyderabad, is now the vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University. One of Singh's works became the only research from an Indian lab to make it to the cover of 'Nature' magazine in October 2010. Singh was never nominated for the Fellowship of Royal Society . Bhargava feels the Padma Shri that Singh got was far too little for his genius.

So, what is wrong with the system? "The problem is," says Singh, "that the system doesn't work." C N R Rao, head of the scientific advisory council to the Prime Minister, feels it is better sometimes that the government does nothing. "Just keep quiet and let scientists do their work, that's enough," says Rao, who feels the government has no clear-cut policy to promote science and scientists in India. 

 

"Patriotic Particles, Fuming Frenchmen"

by

Tunku Varadarajan

July 9th, 2012

Daily Beast

While most of the world was giddy with geeky joy over the discovery of the Higgs boson—or “God particle”—India reacted like a bride jilted at the altar. “Scientists from India seldom get their due,” sulked one headline in a Delhi daily, highlighting the fact that in all the celebration of Peter Higgs’s research, scant credit was accorded to Satyendra Nath Bose, a Bengali physicist who worked with Albert Einstein in the 1920s. “Boson famous, Bose remains forgotten,” huffed another Indian paper, explaining that “boson” is a technical term of Einstein’s invention, coined to describe the subatomic particle discovered by Bose—a scientist who, The Times of India said with a blast of astrophysicist jingoism, “towers over Higgs” in ability and achievement. Remarkably, the Indian government also chose to wade into the debate, issuing a brief press release: “The CERN experiment has once again brought focus on Satyendra Nath Bose. For India, God Particle is as much Boson as Higgs.”

Higgs Boson like neutrino?

A few of the headlines this morning...

"A Quantum Leap"--Slate

"Discovery of New Particle Could Redefine Physical World"--The New York Times

"Evidence of 'God particle' reportedly found"--USA

"Higgs boson: it's unofficial! Cern scientists discover missing particle"--The Guardian

"Physicists find evidence of 'God particle'"--Los Angeles Times

"Scientists claim new particle discovery"--BBC NEWS

"Scientists find new particle, probably the Higgs"--Reuters

"In practice, you would have to be monstrously skeptical not to be convinced by what we have now," one physicist working at CERN told the journal Nature.

An eagerness to quantify the universe supersedes scientific methodology...I am a skeptic.

"The Big Reveal: Does the Higgs Boson Exist?"

by

Jeffrey Kluger

July 4th, 2012

Time

One of the two independent teams said Wednesday that it's found strong evidence of a new subatomic particle which resembles the one said to give all matter in the universe size and shape.

Sometime Wednesday, depending on word that comes out of a press conference in Geneva, the universe will cease to exist. All forms of matter — planets, stars, dogs, cars, you — will effectively dissolve. Mass will be no more; only energy will remain.

That's the bad possibility. The good possibility is that researchers working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the mammoth, $10 billion particle accelerator located 380 ft. (116 m) underground at the French-Swiss border — will announce that they've at last confirmed the existence of the long-sought Higgs boson, the particle that explains why all other subatomic particles have any mass at all.

OK, the absence of the Higgs — or at least the absence of proof that it exists — will probably leave the universe unmolested. But if Wednesday's news is that the Higgs remains out of reach, physicists will either have to redouble their efforts to chase the particle down or find something else to explain why anything solid exists. The betting nearly everywhere is that the boson is in the bag — or so close that few serious physicists doubt it anymore — particularly since CERN, the European physics lab that is running the LHC experiments, began touting the upcoming announcement with an uncharacteristic press push on Monday.

"In practice, you would have to be monstrously skeptical not to be convinced by what we have now," one physicist working at CERN told the journal Nature. "But the final decisions on what to say on Wednesday are still being made."

It's wise for the CERN scientists to choose their words carefully, because so much rides on the detection of the Higgs. First postulated in 1964 by Scottish physicist Peter Higgs (who will be on-hand on Wednesday), the eponymous boson has been considered the last bit of proof needed to wrap up the so-called Standard Model of Physics — and, by implication, help conform a century's worth of work that came before.

As Higgs theorized things, the universe is filled with an energy field through which all particles must move much the way an airplane has to push its way through a stiff headwind. The greater the potential mass of the particle, the greater the resistance it encounters. It's theoretically possible for a particle to have no actual mass at all, and indeed, the photon is massless. But that's the exception. All other particles — protons, electrons, neutrons, neutrinos — are eventually pinged by the Higgs bosons that suffuse the field. That tiny collision converts the particle from a packet of energy to a packet of matter. (The Higgs acquires its own mass through its own interactions with the field.)

Improbable, sure, but nearly five decades of calculations and collider experiments have backed the theory. What's always been missing has been the detection of the Higgs itself. That can be accomplished only in a supercollider, where swarms of particles are fired in opposite directions around a huge racetrack-like tunnel and accelerated to 99.9999991% the speed of light. When they collide, they produce tiny explosions that mimic the Big Bang and — like the Big Bang too — generate elementary particles. From that, the thinking goes, the Higgs should emerge.

Last year, two different detectors at the LHC — one known by the acronym ATLAS (for A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) and one known as the CMS (for Compact Muon Solenoid) — detected glimpses of what appeared to be the boson in the debris from one collision. The particles, which flash into existence for only the smallest fraction of a second before vanishing again, weighed in at 124 to 126 billion electron volts, perfectly bracketing the 125 billion that has been predicted for the Higgs.

That hardly settled the case, however. Physicists don't like to declare victory prematurely — remember last year's faster-than-light neutrino that wasn't? — and require a level of certainty that meets one chance of error in 1.7 million. "It's too early to draw a definite conclusion," admitted LHC physicist Fabio Gianotti at the time the Higgs results were announced. "We need four times as much data."

Even as they set about gathering it, more encouraging news came in from the just-shuttered Tevatron collider west of Chicago. In some of that facility's final runs, there were similar, if less precise, findings: Higgs-like particles appeared in the 115-125 billion electron volt range. The Tevatron's older, less powerful hardware made it impossible to narrow the window further, but added to the LHC findings, it was clearly a cause for optimism.

"Based on current Tevatron data and results compiled...by other experiments," said the paper that reported those results, "this is the strongest hint of the existence of the Higgs boson."

Word coming out of Geneva this week is that the latest LHC runs may finally have turned the hints to facts, and the physicists there are not concealing their excitement — even if they're taking care to conceal their identities. "Without a doubt, we have a discovery," one unnamed ATLAS member told Nature. "It's pure elation." That kind of exuberance is unheard of among physicists unless they really, truly have something monumental in hand. (Indeed, Tuesday afternoon, a leaked CERN video reportedly announced "quite strong evidence" of an unnamed particle. The video was quickly taken down.)

The big caveat is that scientists — with their preternatural patience and willingness to move glacially toward a eureka moment over a period of years or even decades — have a different definition of monumental from the rest of us. The new findings are reportedly derived from the ATLAS and CMS detectors too, and both of those instruments have a certainty level of 1 in 16,000. It's easy enough for a lay statistician to calculate the likelihood of a false positive for a discovery that clears both of those hurdles: just multiply 16,000 by 16,000 and you get an error probability of 1 in 256 million — well beyond the necessary threshold of 1 in 1.7 million. But particle physicists aren't lay statisticians, and everything will ride on how they choose to crunch their numbers. The best guessing now is that either way, it will be very, very close.

Ultimately, crossing that final threshold may not matter. Theoretical physics is a little like the logical mind-bender known as Zinno's paradox — the idea that a traveler can never actually reach a destination because first it's necessary to go half the way, then half of the half that remains, then half of that half and on into infinity. In reality, of course, we do arrive where we're going no matter what Zinno says. Over time, enough converging lines of evidence could similarly make the Higgs boson an undeniable reality, even if all the statistical boxes aren't perfectly checked. Tomorrow, however, could provide an even quicker and more certain conclusion, firmly establishing the existence of the Higgs. if so, the LHC will have more than paid for itself — and the universe, not incidentally, can go on as before.

Higgs boson announcement...the drama is not effective

"Physicists to Make Major 'God Particle' Announcement Next Week"

by

Jeanna Bryner

December 8th, 2011

LiveScience

Scientists at the Swiss lab that hosts the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will announce their latest findings in the search for an elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs boson or "God particle," next week. Already blogs and online news outlets are abuzz with speculation about the big announcement.

The CERN lab in Geneva has cautioned that LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments have not accrued enough data to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, an as yet undetected particle thought to give all other particles their mass.

Even so, the BBC is reporting that a "respected scientist from the CERN particle physics laboratory has told the BBC he expects to see 'the first glimpse' of the Higgs boson next week."

The LHC is a 17-mile (27-kilometer) long underground circular tunnel where particles are smashed into one another at near light speed. The collisions produce enormous amounts of energy, releasing various exotic particles that may include the Higgs boson.

Doubts about the Higgs boson?

"Is the Higgs boson real?"

Rumours abound that Cern scientists have finally glimpsed the long-sought Higgs boson. We asked physicists to share their thoughts on the elusive entity.

by

Ian Sample

December 6th, 2011

guardian.co.uk

Soon after Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general at Cern, emailed staff about next Tuesday's seminar on the most sought-after particle in modern times, rumours hit the physics blogs that the lab might finally have caught sight of the Higgs boson.

I wrote last week that the heads of the two groups that work on the Atlas and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will give the talks. That in itself is telling – usually more junior researchers present updates on the search for the missing particle.

Last month, scientists at the lab said that if the particle exists, it was most likely to have a mass somewhere between 114 and 141GeV (gigaelectronvolts), where one GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton, a subatomic particle found in atomic nuclei.

A couple of blogs, including viXra and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, have now posted rumours that the Atlas and CMS teams see Higgs-like signals around 125GeV, though they say the evidence is not robust enough to claim an official discovery.

If the rumours are right and precede a discovery, it means the Higgs boson weighs as much as two copper atoms. That fits quite well with a theory called supersymmetry, which gives physicists a way to unify the four known forces of nature, a feat that frustrated Einstein to the grave.

But enough of the rumours. When the seminar was announced – and before the rumours surfaced – I asked some physicists to share, in a couple of simple sentences, their hunches on what gives mass to fundamental particles. Is it the simplest version of the Higgs mechanism, which gives us what is called the Standard Model Higgs boson? Is it a more complex kind of Higgs field? Or something else entirely? I hoped the replies would give a flavour of the range of views they hold.

Most got back to me. A few kept their replies to a couple of sentences. Some included technical language, and perhaps that was inevitable. One Nobel prizewinner said the Higgs boson doesn't exist. Another responded with a limerick.

Before I list the replies, here is some background. The Higgs mechanism describes an invisible field that, it is argued, split one force into two soon after the birth of the universe. Specifically, it divided an ancient "electroweak" force into the electromagnetic and weak forces we see at work today. The latter is seen in some radioactive decay processes, and is involved in creating sunshine.

The Higgs field splits the electroweak force by giving mass to the particles that carry the weak force (the W & Z bosons) and leaving the particle that carries the electromagnetic force (the photon) massless. The Higgs boson is the quantum particle associated with the Higgs field.

The simplest version of the Higgs boson is described by the Standard Model, a group of equations that explain how known particles interact with each other. There are plenty more complex versions though. Some of these could take ten years to rule out, according to Matt Strassler, a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

One more point. The Higgs field, if real, is responsible for only a tiny proportion of mass. Around 98% of mass of everyday objects comes from the energy stored up in the particles that make atomic nuclei, i.e. quarks that are bound together by gluons inside protons and neutrons. The Higgs field is thought to give mass to quarks and electrons, but that makes up only one or two percent of an object's mass. Let's say I weigh 80kg. That means less than a kilo comes from the Higgs field.

Here are the physicists' responses, in no particular order:

Shelly Glashow, Boston University. Nobel prize in physics, 1979

"They said when the collider goes on
Soon they'd see that elusive boson
Very soon we shall hear
Whether Cern finds it this year
But it's something I won't bet very much on."

Frank Wilczek, MIT, Nobel prize in physics, 2004

"The Higgs mechanism for generating masses is extremely attractive and has no real competition. Beyond that there's little certainty. A near-minimal implementation of supersymmetry, perhaps augmented with ultra-weakly interacting particles, is the prettiest possibility. So I'd like several Higgs particles, Higgsinos, some ghostly stuff, and a pony."

[Note: A Higgsino is a supersymmetric partner of a Higgs boson].

Lisa Randall, author of Knocking on Heaven's Door, Harvard

"It is difficult to think of alternatives that are consistent theoretically and with everything observed to date that don't involve the Higgs mechanism – the process of essentially distributing a 'charge' throughout the vacuum. Elementary particles interact with this 'charge' and acquire mass. It is not necessarily clear, however, what is responsible for that charge in the first place and that is what determines what experiments will see.

"I still think the most likely answer is a conventional light Higgs boson. But when asked what I thought the odds were in a popular lecture, I surprised myself by saying 70%. I've even bet chocolate based on those odds. If not true, I think a heavier composite Higgs boson made up of more fundamental components might be the answer."

John Terning, University of California, Davis

"We know that strong interactions of quarks and gluons provide the bulk of the proton's mass; I suspect that there are some new – very strongly interacting – particles that provide the masses for the fundamental particles. The most spectacular possibility is that these new particles are the magnetic monopoles that Paul Dirac predicted."

Martinus Veltman, Universities of Michigan and Utrecht. Nobel prize in physics, 1999

"You are mistaken about the Higgs search at Cern. The machine runs at half energy so far, and no one expects relevant (for the Higgs particle) results. After the shutdown [in 2013] the machine will gradually go up in energy, and if all goes well (this is non-trivial) then in about half a year the machine energy might reach design value and there might be Higgs-relevant results. So if you are thinking next week then you are mistaken. Of course, we never know what surprises nature has in store for us … It is my opinion that there is no Higgs."

Philip Anderson, Princeton University. Nobel prize in physics, 1977

"I doubt if the opinions of one who thinks about these problems perhaps every 30 years or so will carry much weight. I've been busy. But the last time I thought, I realised a) that the Higgs(-A) mechanism fits the facts too beautifully not to be true, but b) it must be incomplete, because there's no proper accounting of the vacuum energy."

[Note: Anderson essentially described the Higgs mechanism in 1962, two years before Higgs and five other physicists published the theory.]

David Kaplan, University of Washington, Seattle

"I expect some variant of the Standard Model is correct, such as a two-Higgs doublet theory, although later one could well discover the Higgs bosons to be composite particles. Discovery of neutrino masses has opened a window onto physics beyond the Standard Model, and discovery of the mass-generation mechanism for quarks and leptons will open it wider."

[Note: the two Higgs doublet model calls for five Higgs bosons]

David Curtin, Stony Brook University

"It could be the Standard Model Higgs, but I sincerely hope not. Only data will reveal what nature chose, but two of my favourite alternatives are extra dimensions and supersymmetry – their discovery would tell us incredibly exciting things about several fundamental questions, including (but not limited to) the nature of space-time itself."

Gerard 't Hooft, Utrecht University, Nobel prize in physics 1999

"The whole idea that something should give mass to the fundamental particles is a hype that resulted from over-commercialisation of the Higgs theory, which actually might backfire on us. Fact is that in our present theoretical descriptions, most of the mass terms in the equations for the fundamental particles appear to violate an important symmetry (chiral symmetry) unless they can be connected to an additional field, the Higgs field, which would also require the existence of a not yet discovered particle, the Higgs particle …

"However, since chiral symmetry is unavoidable for the inner consistency of our description of the fundamental particles, the beautiful theoretical prediction of a Standard Model Higgs particle still stands out, and I still consider the near discovery of such a particle very likely. Alternative descriptions, such as many Higgs particles, each of which are more difficult to detect, or some altogether different mechanism, are much less attractive theoretically. As we know from the history of science, this argument does not suffice to rule out the existence of such alternatives, but I consider them much less probable."

David Miller, University of Glasgow

"Technicolor models use a new force of nature to generate particle masses. This new force is very strong, confining particles in bound states, and the binding energy gives the mass of the state. This is directly analogous to the generation of mass for the proton by the strong nuclear force."

The "face of God" not to be revealed just now

"Hints fade of elusive physics 'God particle'"

by

Kerry Sheridan

August 23rd, 2011

AFP

International scientists searching to solve the greatest riddle in all of physics said Monday that signs are fading of the elusive Higgs-Boson particle, which is believed to give objects mass.

Just last month, physicists announced at a European conference that a big atom-smasher experiment had shown tantalizing hints of the Higgs-Boson, as the search to identify the particle enters the final stretch with results expected late next year.

Sometimes described as the "God particle" because it is such a mystery yet such a potent force of nature, the Higgs-Boson -- if it exists -- represents the final piece of the Standard Model of physics.

"At this moment we don't see any evidence for the Higgs in the lower mass region where it is likely to be," said physicist Howard Gordon, deputy US ATLAS operations program manager.

ATLAS is the biggest particle collider lab at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)'s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

"I think it is true that the hints that we saw in July are not as significant -- they weren't very significant in July -- but they have gotten less significant now," Gordon told AFP.

However, physicists are not ready to rule out the possibility that it exists, and atom-smasher experiments must still sift through an immense amount of data at the low-end of the spectrum, he said.

"Basically the data has increased by about a factor of two since the report from the European Physical Society meeting in July because the Large Hadron Collider is producing lots of data," Gordon said.

"I think it has always been a possibility that the Higgs would not be there but I don't think we are ready to say that at this moment."

A statement summarizing the latest data, released at a conference in Mumbai, India, said the LHC's "ATLAS and CMS experiments excluded with 95 percent certainty the existence of a Higgs over most of the mass region from 145 to 466 GeV."

CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci whether the particle exists or not, scientists expect to know more by next year.

"Discoveries are almost assured within the next 12 months. If the Higgs exists, the LHC experiments will soon find it. If it does not, its absence will point the way to new physics," said Bertolucci.

The LHC, located near Geneva, Switzerland, is designed to accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together in house-sized labs where detectors record the seething sub-atomic debris.

The smashups briefly stoke temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun, fleetingly replicating conditions which prevailed split-seconds after the "Big Bang" that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

In addition to ATLAS, CERN's CMS experiment, short for Compact Muon Solenoid, is a general-purpose detector that is also searching for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and the essence of dark matter.

"Whatever the final verdict on Higgs, we're now living in very exciting times for all involved in the quest for new physics," said CMS spokesman Guido Tonelli.

Standard physics model is on the line

"End of Higgs Search Will Confirm or Refute the Standard Model of Physics 'Within Months'"

by

Alexis Madrigal

July 24th, 2011

The Atlantic

The number one particle on physicists most-wanted list, the Higgs boson, has played a key role in our understanding of the universe. As first predicted in 1964, the Higgs is theorized to be responsible for giving all other particles mass. Only one problem: no one's ever glimpsed one in any experiment ever. And we've been looking. The reason we run high-energy particle collisions is that all kinds of exotic particles can be found in the rubble. Or, more properly, the signatures of their decay into more prosaic subatomic bits can be detected.

Scientists at Fermilab's Tevatron particle collider have been looking for a long, long time -- and they've made significant strides in recent years in constraining the possible attributes of the elusive particle. But the Tevatron doesn't appear to create high enough energy collisions to find the Higgs.

Now, though, CERN's new atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, has provided what a physicist called a "tantalizing" hint of precisely where the Higgs may be. In fact, "within months" we should have enough data to know for sure where the Higgs is... if it actually exists.

And that's really the most fascinating possibility. If scientists can't find the Higgs even at LHC energies, then the entire model of standard physics will have to be rethought. And there's nothing better in physics than experimental data ruining the theory.

"Two Breakthroughs in Two Days: Scientists Announce Two Higgs Boson 'God Particle' Discoveries"

by

Alastair Stevenson

July 25th, 2011

International Business Times

Within two days of each other, European and American teams of scientists have reported early indications of the elusive Higgs boson "God" particle, the missing link in science's Standard Model theory of particle physics.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern have indicated that they may have made the first steps to discover the mysterious Higgs boson '"God'" particle. The discovery was made when the two teams monitoring the centres two colliders detected unusual bumps in the 120 and 140GeV (gigaelectronvolts) spectrum.

The mysterious Higgs boson is the the missing particle in science's Standard Model theory of particle physics. If discovered, the particle's existence would prove current scientists understanding of why certain elements have mass while others, like light, do not.

The scientists quickly noted that the bump could indicate the existence of the ellusive particle, which is thought to exist between the 114 and 185GeV spectrum.

The research was carried out at the custom built 18-mile tunnel on the French Swiss-border by the Atlas and CMS research teams. The tunnel was built to allow researchers to search for new physics particles and behaviours by slamming subatomic particles together at near light-speed.

The scientists were quick to point out that it is too early to confirm whether the data bump could definitely be attributed to the Higgs particle. Statistical fluctuations, flaws in computer data and human error could all offer alternative explanations for the bump.

"We cannot say anything today, but clearly, it's intriguing," said Atlas spokeswoman Fabiola Gianotti.

Similar Discovery in America

Meanwhile, just two days after the European teams announced their potential breakthrough physicists working at the Fermilab facility in Illinois reported a similar step forward in the Higgs boson particle search.

The lab has its own $10 billion collider named Tevatron. Like the European teams, the U.S. scientists made the discovery by firing protons and antiprotons down multi-mile long tunnels to create high energy collisions.

Like the European teams the Femilab scientists detected similar but "weaker" bumps in their data, indicating the presence of the ellusive particle.

Unfortunately, also like the European Teams, the U.S. team was quick to point out that it was too early to tell whether the data definitively showed the Higgs boson in action. The team pointed out that after the data was further examined it may well point to an alternative explanation.

The particle's existence was first theorised by Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs in 1964. Higgs theorized that certain particles actually gained mass via an invisible field present throughout the universe.

SMACKDOWN for "God Particle"

Only a mother of a physicist could love this? The stalled and patient participants are fighting for supremacy in the discovery of the Higgs Boson [God Particle].

"God's Broken Machine"

As Europe makes repairs to its shiny new particle accelerator, U.S. rivals prepare to steal the prize.

by

Fred Guterl and William Underhill

March 7th, 2009

NEWSWEEK

Investors aren't the only ones feeling a pit in their stomachs lately. Physicists at the world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, are seeing their dreams of Nobel Prizes go down the drain along with the Dow. The collider was sold to the European public as the best chance of discovering a piece of subatomic debris so important to our understanding of the universe that it's been dubbed the "God Particle." Less than a month after scientists flipped the switch on the new machine back in September, however, it broke down. Repairs will take a year.

The wait itself isn't so bad—particle physicists are used to biding their time while technicians fix their big, delicate machines. Now, though, a U.S. rival seems to have exploited the lull by staging a last-minute comeback, threatening to leapfrog the Europeans to the prize. This week scientists at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, will announce new data that not only narrows the gap between them and the coveted God Particle, but also suggests that the LHC may not be particularly well placed to make the discovery at all. The finding is a public-relations blow to the LHC and tarnishes Europe's newly burnished image as a leader in Big Science.

The problem is partly of the physicists' own making. The LHC, completed last year at a cost of €3 billion, triggered an American-style media blitz. The BBC devoted an entire day of radio programs to the project. The world's press ran headlines like "Mankind's Greatest Experiment," "Hunt Begins for Secrets of the Universe" and "The Shot Heard Round the Universe." (NEWSWEEK put the collider on its cover, too.) One account described the LHC itself as the "God Machine."

Perhaps the biggest mistake was in creating such high expectations for what is only one of many goals, though arguably the most important: to discover the Higgs boson (a.k.a. the God Particle). Whether the Higgs exists goes to the heart of particle physics—if there's no Higgs, the "standard model" of the universe that physicists have been honing for a half century would need major revision. Finding out entails sending protons around a magnetic racetrack and then smashing them into one another at high energies. The LHC, the argument went, is the only machine big enough to reach the energies needed to make the Higgs (if it exists) appear.

The only problem with that story is that it might not be entirely true. The standard model predicts that the Higgs will fall within a range of energies—from 114 giga-electron-volts to 185 GeV. The LHC is, without question, master of the upper portion of that range. Using it to hunt the Higgs at the lower energies, however, would be like shooting quail with a cruise missile. Fermilab's smaller Tevatron collider, it turns out, may be better suited. The Higgs, the new Fermilab data show, does not exist for a portion of the upper range, putting it in the Tevatron's cross hairs and suggesting that the LHC may be more peripheral to the search than previously thought. "We've made their jobs a little bit harder," says Fermilab physicist Dmitry Denisov, "because we've excluded the region they're good at."

European scientists are putting a brave face on the news. They emphasize all the other things the LHC is expected to do, such as uncovering evidence of higher dimensions and the mysterious "dark matter" thought to make up 70 percent of the universe. "Seeing the Higgs boson is really a small part of the game," says Sergio Bertolucci, the LHC's director of research and computing. If the Higgs turns out not to exist, LHC data will help in figuring out why not. If Americans are first to find the Higgs, the LHC will help confirm the discovery and embellish it with detail.

Fermilab scientists, in their magnanimity, are eager to agree. "We could not compete with LHC," says Denisov. "Our detectors aren't as modern or complex as LHC's. But to be able to reach this unexplored region of the universe first is, of course, creating a lot of excitement." The findings come as a much-needed morale boost in Batavia. The Bush administration had cut Fermilab's budget, creating a brain drain to Geneva. Now the lab's 900 scientists have begun to feel young again. Cars can be seen in the parking lots on Saturday nights as researchers pore over experimental data. In the past four months, 30 new Ph.D. students have signed on to help with the research—an increase of 25 percent. "That really helps us," says Denisov.

Missing the Higgs boson would be a setback not only to the LHC, but it also might lower Europe's appetite for big, expensive scientific projects that don't have direct relevance to pressing problems like climate change. For the time being, of course, the poor economy has turned all spending into stimulus. When the crisis settles and the bills come due, however, the physicists in Geneva might want to have some dark matter or a few extra dimensions to show for their efforts.

Peter Higgs portrait displayed

Peter Higgs

by

Ken Currie

The portrait of Peter Higgs is on display at Edinburgh University's School of Informatics.

"The Atom Smashers"--eccentric

Now I know why they ran this so late last night. "The Atom Smashers" was a study of eccentric physicists and the race to discover the Higgs Boson--overall somewhat boring. It is a small world of theoretical physicists and the question here, especially in the light of the current economy, is the search for the ultimate particle justified at this time. It is more a matter of philosophy than science...to discover the Holy Grail of high energy physics and possibly offer an explanation of what holds the universe together. The DOE has slowly cut funds at Fermilab and other institutions as well. Money is getting tight and the wholesale search, however grand it would be, is put on the back burner for now. Of course there is the LHC...Fermilab's high-powered competitor that may well discover the Higgs Boson before Fermilab does. The cognitive battle between Fermilab and the LHC, I suppose, is a matter of pride. The search for the Higgs Boson is interesting, but what would it eventually yield?

As a side note, the expository subtitled data was intrusive, overused, and difficult to read.

Fermilab vs CERN--clash of atomic titans

PBS's Independent Lens on Tuesday November 25th will offer a film on Fermilab's competition with the LHC to discover the Higgs boson particle.

"Film chronicles race between Fermilab and CERN"

September 2nd, 2008

Symmetry

A character-driven documentary highlights the cross-Atlantic competition pitting US-based Fermilab against Europe-based CERN in the race to discover the supposed mass-endowing Higgs boson particle.

This research showdown will premier at the world’s largest science celebration, Science Chicago.

The 75-minute film Atom Smashers will air Sept. 19 and 21 at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry with a panel session following the initial screening. Eight Fermilab scientists play key roles while other employees appear occasionally in shots.

Following its Chicago debut, the film will head to several international cities and hit the air ways with a 53-minute version on PBS’s Independent Lens Nov. 25.

Co-director Monica Ross, an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago, said the film doesn’t follow the traditional NOVA-like format of scientist interviews. Instead, the crew followed the lives of scientists working and trying to relax amidst the pressures of dealing with budget cuts, aging machinery, and the threat of watching the prize from a more than decade long search be ripped out of their grasp by the new experiment on the block: the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

"There is enough physics there for the people that are interested to find out what the Higgs boson is and how the Tevatron works," says co-director Clayton Brown, a lecturer at Northwestern University. "But for those people who say, 'I flunked high school physics' there is enough character building, politics and culture to engage them."

In between long hours analyzing data and fixing four-story detectors, you see physicists engaging in athletic and musical hobbies and struggling with questions about how to balance a career and family.

While the larger story of the film draws on the quest for scientific discovery and America’s turbulent relationship with science funding, the characters demonstrate the similarities among the passionate in all careers.

"I think most people don’t tend to associate the words passion and obsession with physicists or scientists in general," Brown says. "They think of them as very dry. It has been really great to show the rest of the world that physicists are just as passionate or obsessed about what they are working on as musicians or poets."

The Chicago-based 137films acquired 110 hours of interviews during 3½ years of filming at Fermilab, in Washington DC, London, and New York. Footage of CERN was borrowed from a director working on a documentary there. The film has received international attention from several film and science festivals.

Although none of the crew has a scientific background, they say they are fascinated by science's ability to explain "who we are, what we do, and why we are here."

The documentary poses questions for the public to consider.

"We hope viewers will come away from this asking themselves: Should we continue to do this type of work? And it looks like the dominance is shifting overseas, is that something we should be concerned about?," Brown says. "Those questions are too important for us to answer for the viewer."

Preview

The Atom Smashers

Fermilab 'ghosts' hint at new particles

Peter Higgs vs Stephen Hawking

Never expected this...

"Peter Higgs launches attack against Nobel rival Stephen Hawking"

by

Mike Wade

September 11th, 2008

timesonline

A row between two of the world's most famous scientists yesterday threatened to overshadow the celebrations as the world's greatest scientific experiment got under way.

Professor Peter Higgs, the scientist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, the particle at the centre of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment, launched a withering attack on Professor Stephen Hawking, saying his work was "not good enough".

Professor Higgs dismissed the views on the £2.6 billion project of the man generally considered to be the greatest physicist of his time, and said that no other particle physicist would view his approach as "correct".

Both men are contenders for the Nobel prize — depending on the outcome of the experiment — and their spat is likely to send shockwaves through the scientific Establishment.

Professor Higgs, who faced a press conference in Edinburgh yesterday, was reacting to an interview in which Professor Hawking jokingly suggested that it would be "more exciting" if the experiment at CERN on the Franco-Swiss border did not find the "God particle" it has been set up to identify.

"That will show something is wrong," he said, "and we will need to think again."

Professor Hawking once placed a $100 bet that the particle does not exist and continues to argue that there are more interesting outcomes to be drawn from the LHC than the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Professor Higgs, who first postulated the existence of the particle 44 years ago, reacted with visible irritation. "I have to confess I haven't read the paper in which Stephen Hawking makes this claim," he said. "But I have read one he wrote, which I think is the basis for the kind of calculation he does. And frankly I don't think the way he does it is good enough."

"My understanding is he puts together theories in particle physics with gravity . . . in a way which no theoretical particle physicist would believe is the correct theory."

"From a particle physics, quantum theory point of view, you have to put a lot more than just gravity into the theory to have a consistent theory and I don't think Stephen has done that. I am very doubtful about his calculations." Other members of the panel moved swiftly to cut off the discussion, suggesting that he had taken Professor Hawking's views out of context.

But it was clear that Professor Higgs did not rate his rival's view that the LHC would be more likely to reveal a number of "partner" particles than the boson. Earlier Professor Higgs had recalled the day when he first conceived the idea that would evolve, 44 years later, into the most expensive experiment in the history of science.

It was Thursday, July 16, 1964, and he was sitting in the departmental library at the University of Edinburgh, reading an article with which he profoundly disagreed.

It contained a theory that challenged his own work head-on. An idea "began to evolve," and by the following Monday morning, as he walked to his university office, he had perfected in his own mind the theory of how particles acquire mass.

In the course of the next fortnight, he would write the two papers that have become the foundation of modern particle physics.

"I solved that theoretical problem to show how it could be done, and could see what the consequence was," he said. "I discovered how to turn something which was like a massless particle into a massive particle. That was slightly surprising, but it was important," said Professor Higgs.

In the days that followed Professor Higgs wrote a short mathematical proof of his theory, describing what would become known as the Higgs boson particle. Then, after an abortive camping holiday, he returned to Edinburgh to dash off his second article, "which became known as the theory".

In the summer of 1964, his paper was rejected by the editor of the European Journal of Physics Letters, who, ironically, was based at CERN.

Professor Higgs was annoyed: "I hadn't said enough to convince anybody that this was really important physics. So I added on some extra paragraphs." The revised article – still less than two sides of A4 paper — was accepted by an American journal, the Physical Review Letters at the end of August.

Higgs boson would become part of the Standard Model, the framework of theoretical physics that for nearly four decades has described how fundamental particles interact.

Since he retired nearly 20 years ago, Professor Higgs, 79, has gradually detached himself from his academic world, preferring to read novels and play with his two grandchildren. He has, however, stayed in touch closely enough to pour scorn on the views of Professor Hawking and on scientists who predicted that the LHC might bring the end of the world.

"Some of the people who have tried to get injunctions to stop the LHC should really know better," he said. Although it could still take up to three years for the LHC to prove him right, Prof Higgs has a bottle of champagne ready. "I will be very surprised and disappointed if it turns out not to be so. But I’m pretty confident," he said.

"Boffinry bitchslap brouhaha: Higgs and Hawking head to head"

by

Lewis Page

September 11th, 2008

The Register

Famous retired physics prof Peter Higgs - of boson renown - has stingingly counter-poohpoohed the theories of his equally well known Nobel Prize rival, Stephen Hawking, who has already poohpoohed Higgs' particle concept. The clash of intellects is expected to be settled by particle-punishment results at the Large Hadron Collider.

Speaking of Hawking's methods at a press conference yesterday, Higgs was sternly critical.

"I don’t think the way he does it is good enough," he snapped, quoted in today's Times.

"He puts together theories in particle physics with gravity ... in a way which no theoretical particle physicist would believe..."

"From a particle physics, quantum theory point of view, you have to put a lot more than just gravity into the theory to have a consistent theory and I don’t think Stephen has done that. I am very doubtful about his calculations."

Hawking is well known to have bet $100 that Higgs' boson brainchild, the so-called "god particle", doesn't exist.

It's thought among boffins that if the elusive deiton - postulated by Higgs back in 1964, but never yet detected - is real, it ought to appear in coming years among the variegated debris to be produced at the LHC by smashing up protons with extreme violence. If it does, Higgs will be in line for a Nobel Prize.

Hawking, however, reckons that instead a number of "partner" particles will appear. These would potentially torpedo the Standard Model on which modern physics is based, and snatch away Higgs' long-awaited Nobel laurels to rest instead atop Hawking's eminent brainbox.

It would seem that the duelling boffinry heavyweights will have to settle the matter in the only honourable way open to men of their sort: with enormous hyper-powered magnetic proton cannons at fifty paces. Higgs for one seemed confident about the result, telling... the Times that he has champagne waiting on ice to celebrate victory.