Peter Higgs: the man behind the machine

05 Jul 2022

Taken from the July 2022 issue of Physics World. Members of the Institute of Physics can enjoy the full issue via the Physics World app.

Achintya Rao reviews Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass by Frank Close

Particle man Peter Higgs visits the CMS experiment at CERN in 2008. (Courtesy: CERN)

As someone who was working at CERN at the time, the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson is close to my heart. So when reading Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass I was keen to learn the life story of the scientist after whom the particle is named. Written by particle physicist Frank Close and released to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the discovery, Elusive is an anecdote-filled, meandering – and sometimes confusing – glimpse into the life and work of the theorist Peter Higgs, whose name is one of three associated with the Brout–Englert–Higgs (BEH) mechanism that gives elementary particles their mass.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was quickly dampened. Just a couple of chapters in, it began to feel as if the title refers to the structure of the book itself, which seemed harder to locate than the elementary particle in question. But while initially disjointed, I suggest you don’t let this put you off the book – it does get better.

I first had alarm-bells ringing as I read the preface, where Close remarks that the Higgs boson was dubbed the God Particle “in media headlines”. However, it was physicist and Nobel laureate Leon Lederman who came up with the epithet for the title of his 1993 book – a fact that Close himself references later in the book. The fact that the media ran with the phrase is neither here nor there, but putting the blame, as it were, on the media seems slightly uncharitable. In the preface Close also only mentions the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics going to Higgs, ignoring until later on in the book that it was jointly rewarded to François Englert, which feels misleading and unfair on Englert. Even the title makes it seem as if Higgs was the only person involved in the scientific endeavour the book goes on to describe.

But I set this aside and continued. As a friend of Higgs, Close is uniquely placed to tell us the theorist’s story, with all the partiality one might expect from such a relationship. Close draws upon their private and public conversations, as well as referring to other books, scientific papers and primary sources. He begins by introducing us to Higgs’ family, including his grandparents. We are told of Higgs’ early education and how he attended Cotham Secondary School in Bristol, the same school that Paul Dirac once attended. It is not immediately clear, however, what relevance some of these snippets have. For example, Close describes Higgs’ conversion to socialism while coming from a traditionally conservative family, but the paragraph, inserted abruptly, does not seem to lead anywhere.

This unexpected dead-end is unfortunately not an exception. Close varies the attention that he gives different areas of physics in a way that can frustrate. Some ideas are introduced and then dropped almost immediately, while other statements are presented as fact without further discussion. Some terms are defined well after they are first introduced, and others have pages and pages of explanation devoted to them, with occasional (and needless) repetition of ideas and phrases – a proclivity raised in a Physics World review of Close’s previous book Trinity. We are told, for example, that Higgs’ father viewed Oxford and Cambridge as places that “were for the sons of the idle rich to waste their time and also that of their tutors”, and are then reminded of this exact sentiment with near-identical phrasing mere pages later.

Having said that, Close’s scientific narrative presents a more historically accurate description of the meandering path that led to Higgs’ ideas compared with other popular explanations of the significance of the BEH mechanism. Commonly, the tales begin with how the mechanism solves the problem of the W and Z boson masses under the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces. Close chooses instead to introduce the reader to the crucial work of Jeffrey Goldstone and the problems arising from his ideas that Higgs and fellow theorists were trying to solve, as well as the importance of Philip‌ Anderson’s 1962 paper that first introduced a mass-giving mechanism. Close also explains in welcome detail the link between the 1964 papers proposing the BEH mechanism to superconductivity, providing a rich history of 21st-century particle physics and its relationship with other domains of physics. Higgs is the protagonist of the story Close tells us but Elusive also explores the crucial roles played by many other principal actors on the particle-physics stage. Despite glossing over them in the preface, Close goes into detail about the work of Brout and Englert, and includes that of Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble.

Close’s writing is peppered with colourful metaphors but unfortunately, some left me scratching my head

Close’s writing is peppered with colourful metaphors but unfortunately, some left me scratching my head. For example, when referring to theorists proposing the existence of new particles, he alludes to trails and peaks before then switching metaphors to cookery and gourmet banquets in the same paragraph. Elsewhere, we are told that the W and Z bosons are bears in a cave, a concept first introduced in pages 44–48 and then dropped in without ceremony some 80 pages later. Bizarrely (or perhaps intentionally?), he later refers to Carlo‌ Rubbia, one of the driving forces behind the discovery of the W and Z bosons, as “a bear of a man”.READ MORE

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None of this is to say, of course, that Close is not a compelling storyteller. There are parts of the book that lead you on with delight: “This particle carried zero charge, so he [Sheldon Glashow] named it Z, and like his native city New York, New York – so good they named it twice – he appended the traditional superscript 0 as well, making it Z0.” But I feel as though the book as a whole could have done with some more forceful editing. Some threads come together to form a unified tapestry, but the images they represent appear disjointed and occasionally without relation to anything else mentioned.

Indeed, on the editorial side of things, the most frustrating aspect of reading Elusive is to constantly gamble as to whether a note at the end of the book is worth looking at: sometimes they are references to papers, while others include a paragraph of contextualizing or expanding information. These notes would have served a better purpose as footnotes on the same pages they are referenced on.

The story of the Higgs boson is longer than the 48 years between the papers that predicted its existence and the announcement that it had finally been found – and it is a vastly more complex journey than is evident at first glance. Elusive is a timely and in-depth narrative, and although Close, as he might put it, has a mountain to climb, at least he is equipped with all of the ingredients needed for a scrumptious meal once at the top.2022 Allen Lane 304pp £25hb

Achintya Rao is a community manager at the Alan Turing Institute and a freelance science writer based in Bristol. He previously worked as a science communicator at CERN for over a decade, and recently passed his viva for a PhD in science communication from the University of the West of England, Bristol

from physicsworld.com     28/8/2022