Higgs boson

The Infinity Puzzle

by Frank Close  · 29 Nov 2011  · 449pp  · 123,459 words

Marriage of Weak and Electromagnetic Forces—to   vii  viii Contents intermission:    Broken Symmetries   “The Boson That Has Been Named After Me,” a.k.a. the Higgs Boson  intermission: Mid-s   : From Kibble to Salam and Weinberg  “And Now I Introduce Mr. ’t Hooft”  intermission: Early s  part  revelation  B. J. and

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the fundamental spherical symmetry of the force of gravity has been hidden. This phenomenon of hidden symmetry, though unfamiliar, is widespread. The story of the Higgs Boson is an example, which is currently the focus of attention. Although that saga reached its zenith in 1964, its provenance began much earlier. So, first

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base. Oscillations around this base give the “Goldstone Boson.” Oscillations can also occur radially up and down the walls at the side of the valley—“Higgs Boson.” See also Figure 9.1. distance from the center, and the other is its orientation relative to some arbitrarily chosen direction. When the ball

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gave the inspiration that eventually solved the puzzle of how the W and Z bosons acquire mass and has led to the quest for the Higgs Boson. An electromagnetic wave consists of intertwined electric and magnetic fields, which jostle electrically charged particles, such as electrons and ions. We know from experience

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originates from America, and Kibble, of the injured team, is himself British. Confusion and misinformation abound. The BBC Web site promoted the version that the “Higgs Boson” was “proposed in 1964 by physicists Peter Higgs, François Englert and Robert Brout.”6 It is indeed true that Brout and Englert beat Higgs into

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itself; however, as we shall see, although they did introduce the concept of the Higgs Field, there is no explicit mention of any massive “Higgs Boson” in their paper.7 In 2010 the J. J. Sakurai Prize, awarded annually by the American Physical Society for work in theoretical physics, was

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do—mode H in (c). The mode G is analogous to the massless Goldstone Boson; the mode H is commonly referred to as the massive Higgs Boson. Although several people discovered The Mechanism whereby vectorgauge bosons can acquire mass, Brout and Englert being the first to publish a relativistic demonstration, only

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and ’t Hooft. When we discussed this together, between events at the Edinburgh Festival in 2010, Higgs added, “However, I do accept responsibility for the Higgs Boson; I believe I was the first to draw attention to its existence in spontaneously broken gauge theories.”15 The properties of “The Boson” in particle

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and becomes massive itself. The massless Goldstone Boson, meanwhile, disappears from view. “The Boson That Has Been Named After Me,” a.k.a. the Higgs Boson 157 The proof that this happens set the course of research in particle physics for the next half century. This cannibalism is in effect what

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Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble are G, H, and K within the “ABEGHHK’tH mechanism” for giving mass to gauge-vector bosons. There is no massive “Higgs Boson” in their paper.33 brout and englert Robert Brout and François Englert met in 1959, became friends immediately, and have worked together ever since. Brout

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as “condensed matter.” He was already a professor at Cornell University when “The Boson That Has Been Named After Me,” a.k.a. the Higgs Boson 163 the twenty-seven-year-old Englert arrived from his native Belgium to become Brout’s research assistant. Englert recalled how Brout had collected him

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. Attendance was good, and Powell followed this with a series of public lectures “The Boson That Has Been Named After Me,” a.k.a. the Higgs Boson 167 about his discoveries of “strange” particles in cosmic rays. His appetite for physics whetted, Higgs entered King’s College, London, where he became

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to the presence of scalar bosons, which together with an equation describing their behavior form the first hints of what has become known as the Higgs Boson. Feeling that Physics Letters was unreceptive, and disfavoring Il Nuovo Cimento, Higgs then sent this revised paper to Physical Review Letters.47 At the

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as particles-photons. Analogously, the Higgs Field can wobble—the base of the valley becoming fuzzy due to quantum uncertainty—and when it does, particles, Higgs Bosons, appear. Englert continued: “To us this was obvious and we felt not necessary to make it explicit after we introduced [what is often called]

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seventieth birthday, at which he recalled his creation of what has become the “The Boson That Has Been Named After Me,” a.k.a. the Higgs Boson 177 “Higgs Boson.” He summarized, “The amount of labor was rather small, and I am staggered by the consequences.” guralnik, hagen, and kibble So it was

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relativistic field theory without mass. This result transcends any particular model. The “The Boson That Has Been Named After Me,” a.k.a. the Higgs Boson 179 challenge today is for particle physics to determine by experiment how, and to what extent, The Mechanism is actually used by nature. Tom Kibble

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have acquired their masses as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, the more massive the vector boson is, the greater is its affinity for the Higgs Boson. In 1967, Steven Weinberg recognized that the electron too can acquire mass by this mechanism. If spontaneous symmetry breaking gives mass to all fundamental

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is the nub. 180 the infinity puzzle During the International Conference on High Energy Physics at Berkeley in 1966, Ben Lee prominently referred to the “Higgs Boson” and the “Higgs Mechanism.” Hagen was present, and following the conference he “sent a letter to about twenty of the most well known participants in

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massive boson, which in particle physics is named for Higgs, may be traced to Goldstone’s original paper. Tom Kibble recalled a suggestion that the Higgs Boson “should be called the Goldstone boson, while the Goldstone boson should be called the Nambu boson—though that would be very confusing!” The words

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whose name today has become associated with this development, and is best known for its—as yet unproved—consequence: the existence and properties of the “Higgs Boson.” While this is a central focus of particle physics investigation today, later chapters will show that in 1964 the concepts were widely regarded as an

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experimental confirmation. Chapter 14 heavy light The electroweak theory is tested experimentally. The prediction of a neutral weak interaction is confirmed. The Higgs Mechanism and Higgs Boson enter the lexicon, along with the Weinberg-Salam model. The neutral weak interaction is found to violate parity. In 1979, Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg

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tests of Quantum Flavordynamics, which confirm the third. Direct experimental demonstration of the dynamics of electroweak symmetry breaking, such as through the production of the Higgs Boson, remains to be achieved. As to the history of the theoretical ideas, the first step—SU2 × U1 and the Z 0—was the essence

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minister— William Waldegrave—who showed a genuine intellectual interest and The Big Machine 329 wonder about science. The idea that the LHC might discover the Higgs Boson, leading to Nobel Prizes, and that Higgs is a British physicist at Edinburgh University, was unashamedly used to gain media attention. The trump card

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Thatcher experienced was analogous to the way that particles gain their masses through their own interactions with the Higgs Field. In Miller’s analogy, the Higgs Boson was like the effects of a rumor passing through the gathering. Small clusters of supporters gathered in intimate groups to hear the news and then

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for Gross, Wilczek, and Politzer. By 2000 the precision data are good enough to give tantalizing glimpses of phenomena that might be caused by the Higgs Boson. Direct observation of the Higgs remains to be achieved. The LHC is approved, designed to explore the region of energy where the breaking of

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frontiers of particle physics. Why is particle physics today so big, whereas Rutherford was a genius with “string and sealing wax”? Looking for the Higgs Boson, or whatever else nature has in store. Why is there something rather than nothing, and why are things as they are? Questions for the

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necessarily imply that leptons and quarks do also. To establish if spontaneous symmetry breaking is the source of their masses requires production of the Higgs Boson,2 and then by examination of the debris when it decays, we may determine if its affinity for various members of lepton or quark

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of hidden symmetry, and its possible manifestation in the fundamental particles and forces, could be the key to sentient existence. Far from referring to the Higgs Boson as “the God Particle,” one might suppose that a mathematical designer would have created perfect symmetry; in such a case, our existence is the

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step were already afoot. The vision even then was that if the electroweak unification were confirmed at LEP, the final piece in the puzzle—the Higgs Boson— would move into the frame. ’t Hooft’s work had relied on the phenomenon of hidden symmetry. The mathematics in Quantum Flavordynamics, and the

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properties of the W and Z as measured in experiment, were already enough to imply that the Higgs Boson, or whatever nature really uses to break electroweak symmetry, would be revealed by experiments that lay beyond LEP’s reach. Why the rush? In

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cause cancellations among the contributions of various Feynman diagrams. That is what happens here. If the electron’s mass comes from its interaction with a Higgs Boson, then there is a fourth diagram to include: where an electron and positron annihilate, producing a Higgs that then decays into the W+ and

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W– (Figure 17.1d). The quantum waves associated with the Higgs Boson cancel those from the other three processes, giving sensible answers (chance never exceeds 100 percent) consistent with the empirical data at the large, but finite

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, energies of LEP. When these theoretical calculations are compared with the data, everything works best if the Higgs Boson—or, at least, something that gives mass to particles and can be simulated in calculations as if it is a simple spinless boson—exists within

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neutrino. To complete the computation, and to agree with experiment, it is necessary to include a further contribution, such as (d), containing a virtual Higgs Boson. to Newton’s Theory of Gravity and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Newton’s theory described all phenomena within its realm of application but

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for exposing supersymmetry is that of the LHC. Along with the possible discovery of new families of superparticles, supersymmetry would also imply that the Higgs Boson is itself but one of a family—its supersymmetric sibling being known as the Higgsino. How much of this is true, and how many

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LHC has become the largest refrigeration plant on the planet. Superconduc- To Infinity and Beyond 351 tivity, which inspired the theoretical ideas leading to the Higgs Boson, is the technological key to the LHC’s operation. After fifteen years of planning, design, and construction, “Big Bang Day” was scheduled for September

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start its first exploration. (You can see how it is doing today by following http://public.web.cern.ch/public/.) The quest for the Higgs Boson has been likened to searching for a needle in a million haystacks. The beams—protons—are themselves swarms of quarks and gluons. Quantum Flavordynamics predicts

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how the Higgs Boson is created by collisions between quarks or gluons, and, thanks to Bjorken’s insight into how protons transport these constituents, one can calculate under

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what circumstances collisions between protons will create a Higgs Boson. As Bjorken’s work led to the discovery of the W and Z, and has enabled Quantum Flavordynamics and the theoretical ideas of ’t

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affairs, whereas an existing universe requires work to achieve. So, within this philosophy, the question becomes: “Why this one?” Examining the properties of the Higgs Boson may ultimately enable us to know why things are as they are. Whether the answers will be found with the proton blunderbuss that is the

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in the eye, although the immense technological challenges are already being confronted. But first, we eagerly wait what the LHC will discover. Either the Higgs Boson will be found—thereby opening the way to answer these questions—or the real explanation, a total surprise, will be revealed. Only nature now knows

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spin, measured in units of Planck’s quantum; examples include carrier of forces, such as photon, gluon, W and Z bosons, and the (predicted) spinless Higgs Boson. 359 360 Glossary Bottom quark: Most massive example of quark with electric charge of –⅓. CERN: European Centre for Particle Physics, Geneva, Switzerland. Charm quark:

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QCD forces. Hadron: Particle made of quarks or antiquarks or both, which feels the strong interaction. Hidden symmetry (spontaneously broken symmetry): See Chapter 8. Higgs Boson: Massive particle predicted to be the source of mass for particles such as the electron, quarks, and W and Z bosons. ICTP: International Centre for

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.pdf. 55. F. Englert, interview by the author, February 2, 2010. 56. P. W. Higgs, Physical Review, vol. 145, p. 1156 (1966). 57. A “Higgs Boson” occurs even for the global symmetry case—for example, the fluctuation in ferromagnetic susceptibility. In Goldstone’s original paper, page 162, three lines beneath figure

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Higgs (interview by the author, August 28, 2010) each agree with my assessment. Goldstone confirmed that the massive mode on page 163 corresponds to the Higgs Boson, but emphasized that he was “certainly most concerned with the massless mode.” Goldstone, e-mail to the author, December 9, 2010. Higgs uniquely associated

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12. There are various flavors of quark, from lightweight up and down to heavy top, by way of the middleweight charm and bottom. 65. Higgs Boson—or whatever more complicated family of particles may actually be involved. The decay rate depends on a quantum mechanical “amplitude” squared and the available “phase

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blossomed in the mid-1970s. For a description and list of references, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor_(physics). 2. I am using Higgs Boson as shorthand for whatever manifestation(s) of the field nature may present to us. 3. As an electron accelerator. In the 1970s SLAC provided

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(Large Electron Positron collider) Larkin, Anatoly, 158 Lee, Benjamin (Ben) Amsterdam conference, 223, 224 background, 171 Gilbert’s criticism of work, 171, 172, 174 “Higgs Boson”/“Higgs Mechanism” names, 180 pi sigma model, 213, 214, 215, 262, 305 Salam promoting himself and, 305, 306, 307 weak force theory, 283–284, 305

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science

by Ian Sample  · 1 Jan 2010  · 310pp  · 89,838 words

for all the true nature of the field that Peter Higgs envisaged. The machine should create ripples in the field that appear as particles called “Higgs bosons.” They are the snowflakes that make up our cosmic snowfield and the final proof scientists need to fully explain why stuff weighs anything. CERN

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when certain radioactive elements decay.15 One more particle completes the Standard Model, a theoretical particle predicted by Peter Higgs’s theory, known as the Higgs boson. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Standard Model wraps up all there is to say about the origin of mass. If all

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Higgs is uncomfortable with his name alone being attached to the theory. In conversation, the Higgs particle becomes the “scalar boson,” or the “so-called Higgs boson.” At one conference, Higgs acknowledged the awkwardness of the situation by beginning his lecture like this: “Contrary to the custom at this conference, I want

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a second. The paper, written by John Ellis, Mary Gaillard, and Dimitri Nanopoulos at CERN, opened on a cautionary note. “The situation with regard to Higgs bosons is unsatisfactory. First it should be stressed that they may well not exist,” the scientists wrote. They ended with an apology to the experimentalists working

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on the collider for having no idea what the mass of the Higgs boson was. The paper went on to anticipate the technical difficulties in finding the Higgs particle at all and concluded: “For these reasons we do

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elusive particle was the most important prize in high-energy physics. The supercollider wasn’t the only machine that had a chance of discovering the Higgs boson. At Fermilab, Lederman’s Tevatron had been colliding protons and antiprotons since 1985, though at energy levels too low to prove the existence of

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expecting to switch it on within two years. Both machines would need major upgrades before the scientists would have a realistic shot at discovering the Higgs boson, but at least they were up and running. In the particle accelerator business, that is no trivial achievement. The supercollider was supposed to have

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which they could look deeper inside the atom than any other nation could hope to for decades. The machine was expressly designed to find the Higgs boson, but would almost certainly discover new phenomena no one had predicted. At the time, the estimated cost of building the supercollider was $4.4

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to be an overtly nationalist project that conflicted with their hopes of a coordinated global endeavor. Mathematics suggested that, to be sure of finding the Higgs boson (or whatever else gave particles mass, if it wasn’t the Higgs), the next big accelerator must be capable of making particles with energies of

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Lederman and Dick Teresi, an American science writer, copublished a history of particle physics that set the stage for the supercollider’s hunt for the Higgs boson. According to Lederman, the book’s editor rejected any titles that mentioned Higgs and his mysterious boson. They had to be more inventive. Lederman

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is plain lame. Some hate the fact that the media embraced the name for no better reason than that it sounds more intriguing than the “Higgs boson.” Peter Higgs winces at it. He worries it is aggrandizing, even offensive to those with religious beliefs. Lederman is approaching his nineties now and

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lift a veil on spiritual matters. Lederman is adamant that if the supercollider had been built, physicists would have discovered the Higgs boson long ago. “We would have found the Higgs boson by 1998 or 1999,” he says. “We would have either found it or said there’s something else going on with

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ground at CERN’s lab near Geneva, it was designed to create and study Z particles before pushing on to higher-energy territory where the Higgs boson was thought to be hiding. The story of the LEP collider begins long before the machine started crashing particles together in 1989. The construction

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demise of the Superconducting Supercollider in the United States, LEP physicists became the first particle-accelerator scientists to begin a serious hunt for the Higgs boson.1 Although the Tevatron was up and running at Fermilab in 1985—four years before LEP saw its first collisions—it had not yet smashed

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going on, scientists working on the machine’s four large detectors, Aleph, Opal, L3, and Delphi, scoured their data for telltale signs of the Higgs boson. Somewhere amid a decade’s worth of collisions, they hoped to see debris patterns that were the unmistakable signatures of the long-sought-after particle

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legal action that threatened to close American and European particle colliders, an outcome that would have crippled particle physics and brought the hunt for the Higgs boson to a halt. Though the scare stories centered on the Rick machine at Brookhaven, they came at a sensitive time for both CERN and

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. The CERN teams worked around the clock. They tried new ways of analyzing the collisions in the hope of improving their chances of spotting a Higgs boson. The operators made sure the machine kept running at the very limit of its capability. At the September meeting, CERN’s director general, Luciano

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until November 2.10 To run on any longer, they argued, would delay engineering work on the Large Hadron Collider unnecessarily.11 Even if the Higgs boson was there, and the machine kept running until December, the scientists were unlikely to make enough Higgs particles to reach the magic 5-sigma

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Virtual black holes are similar but are produced by fluctuations in spacetime. Their existence would be fleeting, but, Hawking argues, problematic enough to obscure the Higgs boson. When Peter Higgs heard about Hawking’s bet he wasn’t impressed. Hawking, he said, merged particle physics and gravity in a way “no theoretical

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Word soon got around that L3 might have seen the Higgs particle. Three things made the event important. Calculations showed that if it was a Higgs boson, then it was around the same mass as the particle the Aleph detector had seen. It was independent confirmation from another detector, which allayed any

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That afternoon, hundreds of CERN scientists packed into the main auditorium to hear the first open talk on the latest in the hunt for the Higgs boson. Peter Igo-Kemenes, a physicist from the University of Heidelberg and a member of CERN’s Higgs working group, took the audience through the

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there. Turning LEP off now left the answer dangling and could gift the discovery to the Tevatron scientists. Others argued that the evidence for the Higgs boson wasn’t strong enough to disrupt the LHC schedule and that the cost was too much to bear. Crucially, some argued that the Experiments

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game. Scientists argued that LEP should have run for another year because the laboratory’s raison d’être was to discover new physics. If the Higgs boson had been found in 2001, scientists could have beavered away on the implications of its existence while heavy machinery installed LEP’s replacement, the

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the story. They were astonished to read the article, they wrote, considering that “all our data are consistent and compatible with the existence of the Higgs boson, which remains one of the key issues for our understanding of particle physics.” Swain got a barrage of emails and phone calls. His colleagues were

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flak in the press, and relations became strained between the teams that ran the machine and the scientists on the detectors. The search for the Higgs boson was going nowhere, because the machine wasn’t colliding enough particles. The teething troubles at the Tevatron meant that at higher energies it was

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equipment. By early 2005, the accelerator was firing on all cylinders and steadily crashing enough particles to give scientists a hope of finally seeing the Higgs boson. Like anyone who has a calling, particle physicists go where the jobs are. As high-energy facilities rise and fall on different continents, scientists

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particle we know of is partnered with a hypothetical force-carrying particle. The electron pairs with the “selectron” and the quark with the “squark.” The Higgs boson gets its own superpartner too, the “Higgsino.” At first glance, supersymmetry seems like a mischievous ruse to make the world more complicated than it is

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the Higgs is easily influenced by virtual particles that pop in and out of the vacuum. These fleeting particles contribute to the mass of the Higgs boson itself and could plausibly make it spectacularly overweight. If you tot up the extra mass these virtual particles can bestow on the Higgs, its weight

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so exquisitely sensitive to the most minuscule changes? Supersymmetry offers a way out. In the supersymmetric quantum world, superpartners cancel out the mass that the Higgs boson gains from virtual particles. If a W boson pops into existence and makes a passing Higgs particle heavier, the W’s hidden twin, the wino

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the decision has consequences. Many physicists concede that the machine may not make a concrete Higgs discovery before 2015. It is entirely possible that the Higgs boson has already been created in particle collisions at the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider, but in such small numbers as to go unnoticed. A

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Higgs particle is highly unstable and is expected to decay into other particles almost as soon as it is created. If hidden worlds exist, the Higgs boson could decay into invisible hidden-world particles. These might then break down into “real” particles that we could see. The effect would show up

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a recluse, but like any convenient stereotype, the image is a flawed one. When the media sporadically turns its spotlight onto the hunt for the Higgs boson, the man behind the particle can be besieged with requests for interviews. They come from all over: radio stations in Moscow, TV stations in

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fields. The two charged components give mass to the positively and negatively charged W bosons. One neutral component gives mass to the Z boson. The Higgs boson is the quantum of the remaining neutral component field. 21 For more on Gödel’s work, see Thinking about Gödel and Turing: Essays on

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. 8 Some scientists think the true Higgs field may have powered inflation, the exponential expansion of the early universe. See, for example, “The Standard Model Higgs Boson as the Inflaton,” by F. Bezrukov and M. Shaposhnikov, Physics Letters B 659, no. 3, ( January 24, 2008): 703-706. 9 The story was

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July 20, 2000. 7 See minutes of the LEP Committee Special Seminar, closed session, September 5, 2000. 8 See “CERN Considers Chasing Up Hints of Higgs Boson,” by Alison Abbott, Nature 407 (September 7, 2000). 9 See LEP Committee, Special Seminar, minutes. 10 See minutes of the 148th meeting of the CERN

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Alastair Dalton, The Scotsman, September 2, 2002. 14 For a detailed discussion of the different decays and probabilities, see “Direct Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson,” by P. Janot and M. Kado, Comptes Rendus Physique 3 (2002): 1193. 15 Ross Berbeco, speaking on Frontiers, BBC Radio 4, November 1, 2000.

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shows the data for a potential 115-GeV-mass Higgs particle is from the CDF group T. Aaltonen et al., “Inclusive Search for Standard Model Higgs Boson Production in the WW Decay Channel Using the CDF II Detector,” Physical Review Letters 104 (2010), available at arXiv, article ID 1001.4468v2. For

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Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking. Oxford University Press, 2001. Ellis, J., et al. “A Phenomenological Profile of the Higgs Boson.” Nuclear Physics B 106, no. 2 (1976): 292-340. Ellis, J., et al. “Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions.” Journal of Physics G

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What Is the Question? Mariner Books, 2006. Llewellyn-Smith, C. “How the LHC Came to Be.” Nature, July 2007. Maddox, M. “The Case for the Higgs Boson.” Nature, April 1993. Mironov, A., et al. “If LHC Is a Mini-Time-Machines Factory, Can We Notice?” Facta Universitatis. Series: Physics, Chemistry and Technology

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design W/Z particles and CERN LEP (Large Electron Positron) collider about/description closing plans/extensions competition with Fermilab’s Tevatron construction evidence for Higgs Higgs boson and high-speed train effects Lake Geneva and meetings/decision on closing moon/sun effects pollution concerns and pushing to limit sabotage Thatcher’s speech

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particles and Z particles and CERN LHC (Large Hadron Collider) about/description competition with Fermilab’s Tevatron construction/schedule doomsday scenarios and explosion (2008) funding Higgs boson and media on “imaginary” goal repairs/safety system (2011) running at half energy supersymmetry and switch-on U.S. colliders and Chadwick, James Churchill,

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collider beginnings collider doomsday scenarios and description See also National Accelerator Laboratory; specific individuals Fermilab Tevatron competition with CERN description detectors design heaviest particle and Higgs boson and improvements location meeting on plan protestors supersymmetric Higgs work of Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier and Megascience Feynman, Richard about Dyson and handedness of

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Theories (GUTs) Gravity Grivaz, Jean François Guralnik, Gerry electromagnetism/weak force and Hagen and theory of mass wife (Susan) Guth, Alan Hagen, Dick Guralnik and “Higgs boson” term theory of mass Hahn, Otto Halsman, Philippe Handedness of nature Harris, Sir Arthur “Bomber,” Harvey, Bernard Hasert, Franz-Josef Hawking, Stephen background bet with

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Kane black holes disagreement with Higgs on Higgs boson SSC virtual black holes Heisenberg, Werner atomic bomb and conference of quantum mechanics theory HEPAP (U.S. High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel) Hepp, Klaus Herrington

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, John Hidden dimensions Hidden worlds and Higgs boson Higgs, Jody Williamson Higgs, Peter CERN LEP collider doomsday scenarios and credit for “Higgs” theory disagreement with Hawking Harvard talk Nambu’s research and nuclear

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Washington Post Watson, James Weak force See also Electroweak force/theory Weapons of “mass” destruction Weinberg, Steven background credit for discoveries and electroweak theory GUTs Higgs boson SSC theory of mass Wells, James Westfall, Gary White, Robert M. Wick, Gian Carlo Wideroe, Rolf Wien, Willy Wightman, Arthur Wilczek, Frank background collider

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” dream Witten, Ed World War II years German Jewish scientists and nuclear fission/atomic bombs and technology development examples Wormholes Z boson about discovery finding Higgs boson and supersymmetric partner See also specific accelerators/colliders; W/Z bosons Zweig, Georg Copyright © 2010 by Ian Sample Published by Basic Books, A Member

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

by Sabine Hossenfelder  · 11 Jun 2018  · 340pp  · 91,416 words

says: “We are so confused.” Finally, something I understand. Failure In the first years of its operation, the LHC dutifully delivered a particle called the Higgs boson, the existence of which had been predicted back in the 1960s. My colleagues and I had high hopes that this billion-dollar project would do

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to test a proposed improvement. It took twenty-five years from the prediction of the neutrino to its detection, almost fifty years to confirm the Higgs boson, a hundred years to directly detect gravitational waves. Now the time it takes to test a new fundamental law of nature can be longer than

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seen them. GORDY’S ESTIMATE relies on one of the main motivations for supersymmetry: it avoids the need to fine-tune the mass of the Higgs boson, one of the twenty-five particles of the standard model. This argument is representative of many similar arguments that we will encounter later, and therefore

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large, indeed, by a factor of 1014. Not a little bit off, but dramatically, inadmissibly wrong.* That the math gives a wrong result for the Higgs boson’s mass is easy to remedy. One can amend the theory by subtracting a term so that the remaining difference gives the mass we observe

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or not: even if ‘squarks’ and ‘gluinos’ [two types of superpartners] are as heavy as 2.5 TeV, the LHC will find them.”46 The Higgs boson was found with a mass of approximately 125 GeV. But no superpartners have shown up, nor has anything else that the standard model can’t

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that “the scales separate.” This separation of scales is the reason why you can go through life without knowing a thing about quarks or the Higgs boson, or—to the dismay of physics professors all over the world—without having any clue what quantum field theory is. This separation of scales has

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with observations) must be close together. This small distance corresponds to the ugly small numbers that we discussed previously, such as the mass of the Higgs boson. FIGURE 5. Illustration of the flow in theory space for the case when the theory (e.g., the standard model, marked with X) at low

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and was largely completed by the late 1970s. Besides the fermions and gauge bosons, there is only one more particle in the standard model: the Higgs boson, which gives masses to the other elementary particles.2 The standard model works without the Higgs; it just doesn’t describe reality, because then all

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referred to the Higgs as the “flush toilet” of the standard model—it was invented for a purpose, not because it’s pretty.3 The Higgs boson, proposed independently by several researchers in the early 1960s, was the last fundamental particle to be discovered (in 2012), but it was not the last

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a supersymmetry theorist like me.”11 Jonathan Ellis, a theorist at CERN, has referred to the possibility that the LHC would find nothing but the Higgs boson as “the real five-star disaster.”12 The name that has stuck, however, is “the nightmare scenario.”13 We’re now living this nightmare. I

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the upper limits gives some hope. Things actually have to be heavy, and it makes some sense that the LHC wouldn’t see it.” The Higgs boson decays quickly after being produced, and its presence must be inferred from the decay products that reach the detector. But how the Higgs decays depends

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. So when physicists fret about numbers, it’s only the ones without units that are worrisome, such as the ratio of the mass of the Higgs boson to the mass of the electron, which comes out to be approximately 250,000:1. The conundrum with the mass of the

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Higgs boson, which we discussed earlier, isn’t that the mass itself is small, since such a statement depends on the units involved and is therefore meaningless.

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still locked in mystery. They would change the world. They would be heroes. And they’d finally be able to calculate the mass of the Higgs boson. I can see the appeal. I cannot, however, see that deriving a unique law of nature is more than a dream. To get there, I

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most of the zoo was composite, made up from merely twenty-four particles that were not further decomposable. These twenty-four particles (together with the Higgs boson, added later, to make a total of twenty-five) are still elementary today, and the standard model plus general relativity still explain all observations. We

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broken. The symmetry of the electroweak interaction, for example, is restored at just about LHC energies, a signal of which is the production of the Higgs-boson. THE STANDARD model needs three different symmetry groups—U(1) and SU(2) for the electroweak interaction, and SU(3) for the strong nuclear force

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should be able to answer questions unambiguously regardless of whether it can be tested. Such questions of consistency are rare and extremely powerful guides. The Higgs boson is an example of such a prediction of necessity. The standard model without the Higgs becomes internally inconsistent at the energy scales accessible at the

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of the probabilistic interpretation of the standard model allowed us to conclude that the LHC must find new physics, which appeared in form of the Higgs boson. These were questions that could be tackled with math. But most of the problems we deal with now are not of this kind. The one

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only three.2 Besides the fermions (quarks plus leptons) and gauge bosons, there is only one more particle in the standard model, which is the Higgs boson. It is massive and is not a gauge boson. The Higgs is electrically neutral and its task is to give mass to the fermions and

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of the Union 1. O’Brien FJ. 1858. The diamond lens. Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23169. 2. Strictly speaking, it’s not the Higgs boson that gives masses to elementary particles but the non-vanishing background value of the Higgs field. The masses of composite particles like neutrons and protons

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for my purposes. Just to mention two recent ones: Carroll S. 2013. The particle at the end of the universe: how the hunt for the Higgs boson leads us to the edge of a new world. New York: Dutton; Moffat J. 2014. Cracking the particle code of the universe: the hunt for

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the Higgs boson. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2. Eberhart O et al. 2012. “Impact of a Higgs boson at a mass of 126 GeV on the standard model with three and four fermion generations.” Phys Rev

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, 67 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 32 Bondi, Hermann, 30 Bose, Satyendra, 11 bosons, 11, 13, 239 fermion formation of, 159 gauge, 52–53, 53 (fig.) Higgs. See Higgs boson quantum mechanics of, 131 supersymmetry and, 181 Bousso, Raphael, 185–186 Brahe, Tycho, 76–77 branes, in string theory, 175 Brownian motion, 44 bubble collision

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standard model, 70 Hawking radiation, 183–185, 229 Heisenberg, Werner, 22, 28, 67 heliocentric model, 75–77, 129 hidden sector, 199 hierarchy problem, 72, 150 Higgs boson, 240 decay of, 63 discovery of, 5, 55–56 electroweak interaction and, 142 grand unification and, 143 mass of, 37–38, 63–64, 158–159

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Positron (LEP) collider, 13, 81, 150 large extra dimensions, 15, 163 Large Hadron Collider (LHC), 3 energy tested at, 59 extra dimensions and, 14–15 Higgs boson and, 5, 63 naturalness and, 80–81 resolution of, 51 second run results from, 85–86 standard model and, 109 string theory and, 173–174

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Mach, Ernst, 21, 24 Mack, Katherine, 202–206 many worlds, 105, 125–126, 128 marketplace of ideas, 195–196 mass of electrons, 78, 150 of Higgs boson, 37–38, 63–64, 158–159, 180, 205–206 ratios in standard model, 70–71 mathematical consistency, 98–99 mathematical modeling, 9 mathematical physicists, 7

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space and, 47, 47 (fig.) gauge couplings in, 82 gauge symmetry and, 51–54, 239 general relativity and, 72, 179 gravity and, 56, 209–210 Higgs boson and, 179–180 LHC and, 109 mass ratios in, 70–71 mixing matrices of, 71 naturalness of, 14, 78–80 parameters of, 70 particles of

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group for, 142 SU(2), 142, 239 SU(3), 142, 239 SU(5), 142–144, 152–153 sunk cost fallacy, 230 super-LHC, 82 superpartners Higgs boson and, 63–64 lack of detection of, 12 Lisi bet on, 165–166 naturalness and, 38–39 string theory and, 36 supersymmetric grand unification, 72

Collider

by Paul Halpern  · 3 Aug 2009  · 279pp  · 75,527 words

like encountering the largest alien spaceship imaginable—docked in an equally vast spaceport. If massive new particles are discovered in coming years—such as the Higgs boson, theorized to supply mass to other natural constituents—this could well be the spawning ground. It would come not with the push of a button

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torrent of information produced via computers located in designated centers around the globe. Then they will look for special correlations, called signatures, corresponding to the Higgs boson and other sought-after particles. It was humbling to think that the huge artificial cave housing ATLAS comprises but a portion of the LHC’s

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true vacuum), to a place along the rim (a non-zero energy state, called the false vacuum). The arbitrary place on the rim where the Higgs boson ends up—indicating its phase (a type of internal parameter that can assume different angles, like the hands on a clock)—locks in the phase

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the tracts, then all of the others could follow, and the tracts would each remain symmetric. That’s similar to the high-temperature case for Higgs bosons. However, suppose the first house appears in the southwest corner of one of the tracts. The neighboring houses, required to be a specific distance from

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house had been built in the northeast corner instead, perhaps that would have set the overall trend as well. Similarly, the phase choice of a Higgs boson locally sets the overall phase globally. As Higgs demonstrated, once the boson field’s phase is set, it acquires a mass associated with its nonzero

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of energy into mass described by Einstein’s special theory of relativity that takes place during the transition between the different vacuum states. Moreover, the Higgs boson interacts with other particles and bestows them with their own masses. Thus, the Higgs could well have set the masses for all of the massive

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to be leftover and detectable. Surprisingly, despite several decades of experimental investigations at that energy, the Higgs boson has yet to be found. Through the LHC, the physics community hopes at long last to identify the Higgs boson and establish the Standard Model on debt-free grounds. LHC researchers are fully aware that the

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consider the Standard Model predictions along with several alternatives, hoping that experimental results will distinguish among the possibilities. For example, experimenters are preparing themselves for Higgs bosons of higher mass than the Standard Model forecasts or even, as some theories foretell, a triplet of Higgs particles. As midwives to a possible impending

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+, W-, and Z0 are known as the intermediate vector bosons, the designation “vector” referring to their particular transformative properties. The fourth predicted particle is the Higgs boson, which through its spontaneous symmetry breaking (as discussed in chapter 2), supplies mass to the W+, W-, and Z0 bosons, along with the quarks and

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remain a major player. But European physicists have shown how an existing collider ring at Geneva could be upgraded to within probable reach of the Higgs boson. Buying into the European ring would be cheaper.7 By mid-to-late 1988, Congress had allocated $200 million toward the SSC. Proceeding with caution

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Project for particle physics, or simply finding a good-paying position, more than two thousand workers relocated to Texas. The lure of potentially finding the Higgs boson or supersymmetric companion particles enticed many an adventurous physicist to venture south of glittery Dallas and try his or her luck with collider roulette. For

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even riskier venture, however, because it could well have been obsolete by the time it went on line. What if the Tevatron had found the Higgs boson by then? Once the collider lab’s anticipated costs rose to approximately $10 billion, largely because of the pushing back of its schedule, it was

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wrote, “Geneva . . . has fewer good rib restaurants but more fondue and is easier to spell and pronounce.”23 Humanity’s best chance of finding the Higgs boson and possibly identifying some of the lightest supersymmetric companion particles now rests with the Large Hadron Collider. Though it will crash particles together at lower

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the world for analysis by means of a state-of-the-art system called the Grid. Each team has an excellent shot at identifying the Higgs boson, assuming its energy falls within the LHC’s reach. If one team finds it, the other’s efforts would serve as vital confirmation. The research

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keep their eyes on the big picture. Results could take years, but the history of science spans the course of millennia. The identification of the Higgs boson and/or the discovery of supersymmetric companion particles could shape the direction of theoretical physics for many decades to come. Another field eagerly awaiting the

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Geiger, Hans Geiger counter GEM (Gammas, Electrons, and Muons) group General Dynamics general theory of relativity Georgi, Howard Glashow, Sheldon gluinos gluons “God particle.” See Higgs boson gold-foil experiments in radiation Goldhaber, Gerson Goldhaber, Maurice Goudsmit, Samuel Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) gravitons gravitational microlensing gravity (gravitation) ADD model and deceleration of

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. Richard Hahn, Otto Haidt, Dieter Hawking, Stephen Hawking radiation heavy hydrogen Heisenberg, Werner helium hermeticity Hernandez, Paul Herschel, William Hertz, Heinrich hierarchy problem Higgs, Peter Higgs boson CERN particle detector research on description of Higgs’s work with Large Hadron Collider (LHC) search for lepton collider in search for nickname of “God

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” for original reception to first publication of research by Higgs on possibility of multiple Higgs particles Standard Model prediction of Higgs field. See Higgs boson Higgs mechanism Higgs particle. See Higgs boson high-temperature superconductivity Hoddeson, Lillian hot dark matter Hoyle, Fred Hubble, Edwin Hughes, James hydrogen IBM induction inflation infrared radiation inner detector

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far

by Lawrence M. Krauss  · 21 Mar 2017  · 335pp  · 95,280 words

, author of Just Six Numbers “It is an exhilarating experience to be led through this fascinating story, from Galileo to the Standard Model and the Higgs boson and beyond, with lucid detail and insight, illuminating vividly not only the achievements themselves but also the joy of creative thought and discovery, enriched with

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is so ornate that it almost seems arbitrary. “Aha!” is usually the furthest thing from the lips of the noninitiated when they hear about the Higgs boson or Grand Unification of the forces of nature. To move beyond the surface layers of reality, we need a story that connects the world we

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also exist a leftover massive scalar (i.e., spinless) boson particle associated with the field whose condensate broke the symmetry in the first place. The Higgs boson was born. Physical Review Letters promptly accepted the paper, but the referee asked Higgs to comment on the relation of his paper to a paper

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Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble, also published a paper including many of the same ideas. You may wonder why we call it the Higgs boson and not the Higgs-Brout-Englert-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble boson. Besides the obvious answer that this label doesn’t trip lightly off the tongue, of

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supersymmetric partners of ordinary matter—at the scale currently being probed at the LHC. This would solve the naturalness problem because it would protect the Higgs boson masses from possible quantum corrections that could drive them up to be as large as the energy scale associated with Grand Unification. Supersymmetry could allow

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the observed energy scale of the weak interaction. All of this comes at a cost, however. For the theory to work, there must be two Higgs bosons, not just one. Moreover, one would expect to begin to see the new supersymmetric particles if one built an accelerator such as the LHC, which

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the Higgs continued without yielding any results, accelerators began to push closer and closer to the theoretical upper limit on the mass of the lightest Higgs boson in supersymmetric theories. The value was something like 135 times the mass of the proton, with details to some extent depending on the model. If

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–90 Higgs, Peter, 203–7, 231, 271 background of, 203–4 Glashow on research of, 207, 254, 276 Higgs boson publication of, 206, 207 quarks and, 204 spontaneous symmetry and, 205–7, 214 Higgs boson doubts about existence of, 255, 270 first publication on, 206 forcing emergence of, 256–57 gauge symmetry and, 217

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, 114–15 Young’s double-slit experiment and, 73, 76 quarks Gell-Mann’s research on, 163, 193–94, 231–32, 233–34, 236, 240 Higgs boson emergence and, 256–57 origin of name, 193 Quinn, Helen, 277, 278 R Rabi, I. I., 132, 148 radiation cosmic microwave background (CMB), 290, 292

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything

by John Gribbin  · 29 Nov 2009  · 185pp  · 55,639 words

in any preferred direction at each point of ‘real’ space. The effect of all this on the vector bosons is dramatic. There are four scalar Higgs bosons required by the field theory, and as we already know the basic Yang-Mills approach gives three massless vector bosons. When the two elements are

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put together, three of the Higgs bosons and the three vector bosons merge with one another—in the graphic terminology used by Abdus Salam, the vector bosons each ‘eat’ one of the

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Higgs particles. And when this happens the vector bosons gain both mass and a spin corresponding to the spin carried by the Higgs bosons. Instead of having three massless vector bosons and four Higgs particles, the theory predicts that there should be three observable vector bosons which each have

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a definite mass, plus one scalar Higgs boson, which also has a large mass but whose precise mass cannot be predicted by the theory. The Higgs field breaks the underlying symmetry in just

The World According to Physics

by Jim Al-Khalili  · 10 Mar 2020  · 198pp  · 57,703 words

need for another Einstein to break the current deadlock. The Large Hadron Collider has not yet followed up on its 2012 success in detecting the Higgs boson, and thereby confirming the existence of the Higgs field (which I will discuss later); many physicists were hoping for the discovery of other new particles

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have been confirmed experimentally. Likewise, Peter Higgs and others who made a similar prediction had to wait half a century for the existence of the Higgs boson to be confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider. It is also the reason why physics as a scientific discipline only began to make truly impressive

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nothing better to replace it with and in part because its predictions have so far been validated by experiments, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 (more of which later). And yet despite this being the best description we have of three of the four forces of nature, physicists

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everything ultimately comes down to quantum fields in the end. All the different particles that make up matter and energy, whether quarks, electrons, photons, or Higgs bosons, can be regarded merely as localised excitations of these quantum fields—like waves on the surface of an ocean. However, if you were to remove

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mean we entirely understand its nature yet. Astronomical measurements suggest that the cosmological constant has a certain numerical value, but, like the mass of the Higgs boson in the Standard Model, we do not know why it has this value. This long-standing problem in physics is known as fine-tuning and

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? Many physicists will no doubt argue that these past few years have been tremendously exciting for fundamental physics, considering the widely reported discoveries of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, followed by gravitational waves at the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) facilities in the United States in

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1960s, not to the experimentalists who made the confirming observation. I guess I should make a more careful distinction here between the discovery of the Higgs boson and detection of gravitational waves. The former was by no means a foregone conclusion; many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, had doubted its existence before 2012

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of the outstanding questions and remove uncertainties from the Standard Model. But, above all else, it was billed as the accelerator that would find the Higgs boson, and it duly did—surely, a resounding success and a justification for the huge cost of the project. But since then, there has been mounting

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. And what of the Higgs discovery itself? What new insights has it given us about the nature of matter? It’s worth noting that the Higgs boson is merely the particle manifestation (excitation) of the more fundamental Higgs field—yet another quantum field that pervades all space and an important ingredient of

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the Higgs field’s existence was found not by detecting it directly, but indirectly, through the creation of the evanescent quantum of the field: the Higgs boson. Finding the Higgs was a remarkable achievement. But, in truth, it was a box to be ticked. The Higgs field was bolted onto the Standard

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the strong nuclear force described by QCD. It also links together the matter particles and the force carrier particles. It would even explain why the Higgs boson has the mass that it does. But solving all these problems comes at a price: supersymmetry predicts the existence of a whole host of new

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all very well—a testament to humankind’s tenacious drive to understand the universe—but so what? Surely, you might think, the discovery of the Higgs boson won’t have any sort of direct impact on our daily lives; nor will the hoped-for theory of quantum gravity help to eradicate poverty

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to hear that many physicists—other than those who had dedicated years of their lives to building the Large Hadron Collider—were hoping that the Higgs boson would not be found. You see, not finding the Higgs would have meant that there really was something wrong with the Standard Model, opening the

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that Explains Everything (New York: Pegasus, 2017; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2018). Frank Close, The Infinity Puzzle: The Personalities, Politics, and Extraordinary Science behind the Higgs Boson (Oxford: Oxford University Press; New York: Basic Books, 2011). Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (London

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, 4, 26–27, 126 helium, 31, 100, 102, 105, 148, 150 Hertz, Heinrich, 280 hidden variables interpretation, 127, 130, 136–37 Higgs, Peter, 13, 25 Higgs boson, 203, 228, 238, 267; discovery of, 6–7, 13, 25, 177, 224, 225–26; mass of, 229–30, 231; in Standard Model, 97, 204, 229

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, 171; spacetime in, 75, 87, 162 speckle, 29 spontaneous collapse models, 128n3 Standard Model, 8–9, 96–97, 177–78, 187; cosmological analogue to, 205; Higgs boson, in, 97, 204, 229; limits of, 9–10, 48, 193, 227, 267; symmetry breaking in, 44 stars, 17, 49, 97, 126, 168; age of, 33

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

by Paul Halpern  · 13 Apr 2015  · 282pp  · 89,436 words

found much success. In the modern concept, instead of actual space, the gauge factor pertains to a kind of abstract space. Contemporary interest in the Higgs boson—essential for explaining the rest mass of certain particles—owes much to Weyl’s gauge concept. Adventures in the Fifth Dimension Yet another Göttingen graduate

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become a rare contemporary example of a well-known, accomplished theorist. Yet his name recognition hardly rivals Einstein’s. The particle named after him, the Higgs boson, has come to be known colloquially as the “God particle.” When it was discovered in 2012, much of his press coverage was shared with a

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divine being. (To India’s dismay, its native son Satyendra Bose hardly got any mention.) Triumph of the Standard Model The discovery of the Higgs boson has supplied the last missing puzzle piece of the standard model of particle physics—the closest thing we have today to a unified field theory

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, leaving the photons massless. The fermions would also accumulate mass. A segment of the original Higgs field would remain as a massive particle called the Higgs boson. By then, so many new elementary particles had been discovered that choosing which fermions to label as fundamental proved critical. Most physicists suspected that protons

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(weak interaction between particles of like charge), the existence of the W+, W-, and Z0 exchange bosons at certain masses, and the actuality of the Higgs boson. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, particle accelerator experiments at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), near Geneva, Switzerland, verified each of those

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predictions except for the last. Finally, the Higgs boson was confirmed through particle collision data collected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. 227 Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat Along with electroweak unification

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of groundbreaking results. Physicists need to be careful, though, not to offer hasty announcements of success, no matter how tempting. The teams that identified the Higgs boson waited patiently for statistics to rule out other possibilities, even if that process took many months. They offered a lesson in perseverance. However, there are

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physics and where to go from here. 236 Further Reading (Technical works are marked with an asterisk.) Aczel, Amir, Present at the Creation: Discovering the Higgs Boson (New York: Random House, 2010). Cassidy, David C., Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2010). ———, Einstein and Our

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Miller, Deciphering the Cosmic Number, 263. 21. Erwin Schrödinger, 1942 poem, translated by Arnulf Braunizer, reprinted in Amir Aczel, Present at the Creation: Discovering the Higgs Boson (New York: Random House, 2010), 33. 22. Ursula K. Le Guin, interviewed by Irv Broughton, Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin (Jackson: University Press of

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Einstein, 211 wavefunction collapse and, 105–106 Heitler, Wallace, 166, 180 Hess, Victor, 46 Hevesy, George de, 46 Hibben, John, 136 Higgs, Peter, 225, 226 Higgs boson, 71, 90, 225, 227, 233 Hilbert, David, 39, 57, 69–70, 72, 82, 172 Hilbert space, 99 Himmler, Heinrich, 178 Hitler, Adolf, 123, 124, 125

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

by Ray Jayawardhana  · 10 Dec 2013  · 203pp  · 63,257 words

tag of roughly $9 billion in large part to nail down the final missing piece of the theory. The LHC confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle hypothesized to be responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass. The standard model, however, presumed that neutrinos have no mass, come in

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marked a triumphant capstone for physics. Two separate experiments at the gigantic Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory revealed compelling evidence of the Higgs boson, one of the most elusive subatomic particles that theorists had ever concocted. With this discovery, the crucial final piece of the grand edifice known as

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, they promise to deliver all this for a reasonable price to the taxpayers who bear most of the costs of doing basic science. Chasing the Higgs boson, on the other hand, cost billions of dollars and took several decades. The Higgs hunt began innocuously enough, with a proposal from six physicists, working

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whether the Higgs field exists and to determine its properties is to detect the particle associated with it. In quantum mechanics we think of the Higgs boson as a vibration in the Higgs field. If there were no field, there would not be any vibrations, so detecting a particle would prove the

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particle accelerator, that would create a strong enough perturbation in the Higgs field to observe the Higgs boson. Unfortunately, the Higgs field theory provided little guidance to experimentalists: it did not specify the mass of the Higgs boson, so they did not know how energetic the collisions would have to be for it be

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, wagered a hundred dollars against Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan, a proponent of Higgs, that the particle would not be found. Finding the Higgs boson, or ruling out its existence, was a top priority for the LHC, built over a decade at a cost of nearly $9 billion with the

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massive than the proton. The researchers had little doubt the bumps signaled the discovery of the Higgs boson. The ATLAS detector, one of the two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider that found evidence for the Higgs boson (cern) Peter Higgs, who was in his eighties by this point, was a guest of honor

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it could be discovered,” he added. Stephen Hawking paid up his bet with Gordon Kane. Like many other physicists, Hawking agreed that tracking down the Higgs boson was a major milestone in the history of physics. However, in an interview with the BBC, he also noted the flip side of what the

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(θ13) is nonzero, and the Daya Bay experiment measured its value. 2012: Two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN discovered the long-sought Higgs boson, confirming a key prediction of the standard model. 2013: Planck spacecraft’s observations of the cosmic microwave background favored the existence of only three flavors

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second most common element in the universe, with two protons in its nucleus. Stars fuse hydrogen into helium; helium itself fuses into carbon and oxygen. Higgs boson: The particle associated with the Higgs field in the standard model that is responsible for endowing some particles with mass. In the summer of 2012

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conducted by the author on March 16, 2012. 8. SEEDS OF A REVOLUTION 168 Chasing the Higgs boson: For accessible accounts, see Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World (New York: Dutton, 2012); and Dennis

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Overbye, “Chasing the Higgs Boson,” The New York Times, March 5, 2012, online at www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science

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/chasing-the-higgs-boson-how-2-teams-of-rivals-at-CERN-searched-for-physics-most-elusive-particle.html; for historical

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.ed.ac.uk/news/all-news/120704-higgs July 6, 2012. 170 “But it is a pity”: Stephen Hawking quote is taken from Paul Rincon, “Higgs Boson- Like Particle Discovery Claimed at LHC,” on the BBC News website, July 4, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18702455. 170 firmed up the

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Higgs detection: See the CERN press release “New Results Indicate That Particle Discovered at CERN is a Higgs Boson,” March 14, 2013, online at http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2013/03/new-results-indicate-particle-discovered-cern

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-higgs-boson. 170 “Higgs is the last”: All Steven Weinberg quotes in this chapter are from a telephone interview conducted by the author on August 10, 2012.

The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data

by David Spiegelhalter  · 14 Oct 2019  · 442pp  · 94,734 words

, to a certain extent, be answered through statistical analysis, although they differ widely in their scope. Some are important scientific hypotheses, such as whether the Higgs boson exists, or if there really is convincing evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP). Others are questions about health care, such as whether busier hospitals have

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attacks and strokes in people like me? Are mothers’ heights associated with their sons’ heights, once the fathers’ heights are taken into account? Does the Higgs boson exist? This list shows that very different kinds of question can be asked, ranging from the transient to the eternal: Homicides and the Poisson distribution

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: a specific question concerning a particular time and place. Statins: a scientific statement, but specific to a group. Mothers’ heights: possibly of general scientific interest. Higgs boson: could change the basic ideas of the physical laws of the universe. We have data that can help us answer some of these questions, with

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of heart attacks and strokes in people like me. Mothers’ heights have no effect on sons’ heights, once fathers’ heights are taken into account. The Higgs boson does not exist. The null hypothesis is what we are willing to assume is the case until proven otherwise. It is relentlessly negative, denying all

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literally true: it should be clear that none of the hypotheses listed above could plausibly be precisely correct (except possibly the non-existence of the Higgs boson). So we can never claim that the null hypothesis has been actually proved: in the words of another great British statistician, Ronald Fisher, ‘the null

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approving a drug, that in truth has no benefit at all, is 0.05 × 0.05 = 0.0025, or 1 in 400. 5. Does the Higgs boson exist? Throughout the twentieth century, physicists developed a ‘standard model’ intended to explain the forces operating at a subatomic level. One piece of the model

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which permeates the universe, and gives mass to particles such as electrons through its own fundamental particle, the so-called Higgs boson. When researchers at CERN finally reported the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, it was announced as a ‘five-sigma’ result.5 But few people would have realized this was an

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which specific events occurred for different energy levels, the curve was found to have a distinct ‘hump’ just where it would be expected if the Higgs boson existed. Crucially, a form of chi-squared goodness-of-fit test revealed a P-value of less than 1 in 3.5 million, under the

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P-value of 1 in 3.5 million – that observed from the chi-squared test – would be five standard errors from the null hypothesis, the Higgs boson was therefore said to be a five-sigma result. The team at CERN clearly did not want to announce their ‘discovery’ until the P-value

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incorrect claim about the laws of physics. To answer the question at the start of this section: it seems reasonable now to assume that the Higgs boson exists. This becomes the new null hypothesis until, perhaps, a deeper theory is suggested. Neyman–Pearson Theory Why did the Heart Protection Study need over

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, given that such extreme data have occurred. This is a subtle but essential difference. When the CERN teams reported a ‘five-sigma’ result for the Higgs boson, corresponding to a P-value of around 1 in 3.5 million, the BBC reported the conclusion correctly, saying this meant ‘about a one-in

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meaning of this P-value wrong. For example, Forbes Magazine reported, ‘The chances are less than 1 in a million that it is not the Higgs boson’, a clear example of the prosecutor’s fallacy. The Independent was typical in claiming that ‘there is less than a one in a million chance

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, we first need to set up two competing hypotheses. A null hypothesis H0, which is usually the absence of something, such as there being no Higgs boson, or a medical treatment having no effect. The alternative hypothesis, H1, says that something important exists. The ideas behind Bayesian hypothesis testing are then essentially

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even calculate posterior probabilities of alternative theories for how the world works. Suppose, based on theoretical grounds alone, we judged it 50:50 whether the Higgs boson existed, corresponding to prior odds of 1. The data discussed in the last chapter gave a P-value of around 1/3,500,000, and

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this can be converted to a maximum Bayes factor of around 80,000 in favour of the Higgs boson, which is very strong evidence even according to legal usage. Bayes factor Strength of evidence 1 to 3 not worth more than a bare mention

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a hypothesis.8 When combined with prior odds of 1, this turns into posterior odds of 80,000 to 1 for the existence of the Higgs boson, or a probability of 0.99999. But neither the legal nor scientific community generally approve of this kind of analysis, even if it can be

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. 4. The dead fish study is described in this poster: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg. 5. The CERN announcement of the Higgs boson is at http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/observation-new-particle-mass-125-gev. 6. D. Spiegelhalter, O. Grigg, R. Kinsman and T. Treasure, ‘Risk

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122–5, 123, 124, 127, 134, 201, 202, 243, 275–8, 276 hernia surgery 106 HES (Hospital Episode Statistics) 20–1 hierarchical modelling 328, 391 Higgs bosons 281–2 histograms 42, 43, 44, 45 homicides 1–6, 222–6, 225, 248, 270–1, 272, 287–94 Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) 20–1

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Wonders of the Universe

by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen  · 12 Jul 2011

This Is for Everyone: The Captivating Memoir From the Inventor of the World Wide Web

by Tim Berners-Lee  · 8 Sep 2025  · 347pp  · 100,038 words

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy

by Moiya McTier  · 14 Aug 2022  · 194pp  · 63,798 words

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge

by Marcus Du Sautoy  · 18 May 2016

Growth: A Reckoning

by Daniel Susskind  · 16 Apr 2024  · 358pp  · 109,930 words

Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain Everything

by Tim James  · 26 Mar 2019  · 189pp  · 48,180 words

Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

by Tom Chivers  · 6 May 2024  · 283pp  · 102,484 words

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe

by Johnjoe McFadden  · 27 Sep 2021

Animals

by Emma Jane Unsworth  · 2 May 2014

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport  · 5 Jan 2016

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman  · 6 Jun 2016  · 281pp  · 78,317 words

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie  · 20 Jul 2020

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

by Rowan Hooper  · 15 Jan 2020  · 285pp  · 86,858 words

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber

by Susan Fowler  · 18 Feb 2020  · 205pp  · 71,872 words

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics

by Jim Al-Khalili  · 22 Oct 2012  · 208pp  · 70,860 words

The Lost Art of Gratitude

by Alexander McCall Smith  · 21 Sep 2009  · 249pp  · 71,432 words

Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now

by Vincent Ialenti  · 22 Sep 2020  · 224pp  · 69,593 words

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data

by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge  · 27 Feb 2018  · 267pp  · 72,552 words

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens  · 12 Oct 2020

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

by Safi Bahcall  · 19 Mar 2019  · 393pp  · 115,217 words

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

by K. Eric Drexler  · 6 May 2013  · 445pp  · 105,255 words

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt  · 10 May 2021  · 291pp  · 80,068 words

Corduroy Mansions

by Alexander McCall Smith  · 1 Jan 2009  · 395pp  · 114,583 words

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason

by Lee McIntyre  · 14 Sep 2021  · 407pp  · 108,030 words

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley  · 395pp  · 116,675 words

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang  · 10 Sep 2018  · 745pp  · 207,187 words

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb  · 27 Nov 2012  · 651pp  · 180,162 words

Learning Scikit-Learn: Machine Learning in Python

by Raúl Garreta and Guillermo Moncecchi  · 14 Sep 2013  · 122pp  · 29,286 words

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

by Adam Rutherford  · 7 Sep 2016

The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World

by Steve Levine  · 5 Feb 2015  · 304pp  · 88,495 words

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet

by Arthur Turrell  · 2 Aug 2021  · 297pp  · 84,447 words

Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World

by J. Doyne Farmer  · 24 Apr 2024  · 406pp  · 114,438 words

How Emotions Are Made: The New Science of the Mind and Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett  · 6 Mar 2017

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

by Tyler Cowen  · 11 Sep 2013  · 291pp  · 81,703 words

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

by Simon Singh  · 29 Oct 2013  · 262pp  · 65,959 words

The Gene Machine

by Venki Ramakrishnan

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought

by Jim Holt  · 14 May 2018  · 436pp  · 127,642 words

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity

by Martin J. Rees  · 14 Oct 2018  · 193pp  · 51,445 words

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

by Scott E. Page  · 27 Nov 2018  · 543pp  · 153,550 words

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together

by Nick Polson and James Scott  · 14 May 2018  · 301pp  · 85,126 words

Advances in Financial Machine Learning

by Marcos Lopez de Prado  · 2 Feb 2018  · 571pp  · 105,054 words

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future

by Brian Clegg  · 8 Dec 2015  · 315pp  · 92,151 words

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil  · 25 Jun 2024

Beyond Weird

by Philip Ball  · 22 Mar 2018  · 277pp  · 87,082 words

Singularity Sky

by Stross, Charles  · 28 Oct 2003  · 448pp  · 116,962 words

Toast

by Stross, Charles  · 1 Jan 2002

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance

by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna  · 23 May 2016  · 437pp  · 113,173 words

Sunfall

by Jim Al-Khalili  · 17 Apr 2019  · 381pp  · 120,361 words

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist

by Michael Shermer  · 8 Apr 2020  · 677pp  · 121,255 words

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us

by Diane Ackerman  · 9 Sep 2014  · 380pp  · 104,841 words

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

by Toby Ord  · 24 Mar 2020  · 513pp  · 152,381 words

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

by Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg  · 15 Mar 2017

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome

by Nessa Carey  · 5 Mar 2015  · 357pp  · 98,853 words

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time

by Maria Konnikova  · 28 Jan 2016  · 384pp  · 118,572 words

Lonely Planet Switzerland

by Lonely Planet  · 3,002pp  · 177,561 words

Generation A

by Douglas Coupland  · 2 Jan 2009  · 312pp  · 78,053 words

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick  · 1 Jan 1992  · 795pp  · 215,529 words

Why We Work

by Barry Schwartz  · 31 Aug 2015  · 86pp  · 27,453 words

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

by Jacob Silverman  · 17 Mar 2015  · 527pp  · 147,690 words

Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

by Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk  · 29 Apr 2013

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

by Jeff Goodell  · 23 Oct 2017  · 292pp  · 92,588 words

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

by Bernardo Kastrup  · 28 May 2015  · 244pp  · 73,966 words

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know

by Richard Watson  · 5 Nov 2013  · 219pp  · 63,495 words

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

by John Brockman  · 14 Feb 2012  · 416pp  · 106,582 words

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

by Jon Kabat-Zinn  · 23 Sep 2013  · 706pp  · 237,378 words

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

by Michael Shermer  · 1 Jan 1997  · 404pp  · 134,430 words

How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (And Knowing When to Trust Them)

by Tom Chivers and David Chivers  · 18 Mar 2021  · 172pp  · 51,837 words

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

by William Rosen  · 31 May 2010  · 420pp  · 124,202 words

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy

by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne  · 16 May 2011  · 561pp  · 120,899 words

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott  · 9 May 2016  · 515pp  · 126,820 words

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory

by Kariappa Bheemaiah  · 26 Feb 2017  · 492pp  · 118,882 words

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant  · 19 Jun 2017  · 416pp  · 129,308 words

Talk on the Wild Side

by Lane Greene  · 15 Dec 2018  · 284pp  · 84,169 words

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle  · 18 Jun 2018  · 301pp  · 85,263 words

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett  · 7 Feb 2017  · 573pp  · 157,767 words

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations

by David Pilling  · 30 Jan 2018  · 264pp  · 76,643 words

Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

by Cecilia Heyes  · 15 Apr 2018

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

by Laura Spinney  · 31 May 2017

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney  · 7 Mar 2017  · 526pp  · 160,601 words

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age

by Matthew Cobb  · 15 Nov 2022  · 772pp  · 150,109 words

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View

by William MacAskill  · 31 Aug 2022  · 451pp  · 125,201 words

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics

by Rory Stewart  · 13 Sep 2023  · 534pp  · 157,700 words

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

by Andy Greenberg  · 15 Nov 2022  · 494pp  · 121,217 words

The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life

by Paul Davies  · 31 Jan 2019  · 253pp  · 83,473 words

A Short Ride in the Jungle

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent  · 6 Apr 2014  · 316pp  · 100,329 words