Elusive – How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass
Elusive – How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass
Frank Close
In the summer of 1964, a reclusive young professor at the University of Edinburgh wrote two scientific papers which have come to change our understanding of the most fundamental building blocks of matter and the nature of the universe. Peter Higgs posited the existence an almost infinitely tiny particle – today known as the Higgs boson – which is the key to understanding why particles have mass, and but for which atoms and molecules could not exist.
For nearly 50 years afterwards, some of the largest projects in experimental physics sought to demonstrate the physical existence of this boson. Sensationally, confirmation came in July 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. The following year Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Frank Close traces the course of much of twentieth-century physics from the inception of quantum field theory to the completion of the ‘standard model’ of particles and forces, and the pivotal role of Higgs’s idea in this evolution. Drawing on conversations with Higgs over a decade (a figure generally as elusive as his particle) this is a superb study of a scientist and his era – and of how scientific knowledge advances.
Frank Close is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Fellow Emeritus in Physics at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the author of The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe and most recently Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History. He was formerly Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. He was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his ‘outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics’ in 1996, and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science in 2013.
