THE NOBEL GENIUS DOWN AT THE PUB
Elusive Frank Close Allen Lane £25 ★★★★☆
Most of us remember the dramatic moment in July 2012 when CERN, the European organisation for nuclear research, announced that the Higgs boson, after years of scientific searching, had finally been identified – even if not many of us could explain what the Higgs boson is. In Elusive, Frank Close tells the story of both
‘the God particle’ (so called because it actually embodies the substance of all the other particles that exist), and
Peter Higgs, the shy, retiring man from whom it takes its name.
Higgs was born in 1929 in Newcastle, his father an electrical engineer so traumatised by his experiences in the trenches that he was convinced that mankind had no future.
His mother was concerned mainly that her solitary, sickly, asthmatic child should speak with Received Pronunciation. He was schooled accordingly, in Birmingham, then Bristol, then at King’s College London, where he studied general relativity, followed by theoretical particle physics.
In 1964, he wrote a paper showing how a previously accepted theorem was flawed. His paper included an equation that was effectively the breakthrough leading to the eventual identification of the ‘missing particle’ that would change the face of modern physics. Only after another 45 years of individual and collective research was the Higgs boson finally identified.
Part one of Elusive is densely written, taking us into the very heart of modern physics and its (to the lay person) strange, elemental vocabulary – this is mind-bending stuff for the uninitiated, but it’s worth persisting, as it reveals the sheer complexity, detail and dazzling precision that, for the scientist, constitutes ‘beauty in nature’. Close maintains a strong narrative line – we are watching and waiting throughout for the Higgs boson to be identified.
Part two gains momentum when, in 1976, Higgs makes his first visit to CERN (now a world centre of particle physics), where other leading physicists joined in the search. Though Higgs worked mainly alone, the discovery of the boson involved tens of thousands of physicists drawn together in a huge
co-operative venture at CERN using the Large Hadron Collider, a stunning triumph of engineering.
The date for the final, hoped-for revelation was set for July 4, 2012.
Cue mounting suspense, a media storm and crowds camping out all night in anticipation of this once-in-a-lifetime moment. Why, asked a journalist of one of the physicists, Joe Incandela, was the discovery so important? ‘This boson,’ replied Incandela, ‘is very profound. We are reaching into the fabric of the universe in a way we haven’t done so before. It’s telling us something that is key to the structure of the universe.’
Higgs was the first to identify it, closely followed by Francois Englert and Robert Brout. When the winners of the Nobel Prize for physics – Higgs and Englert (Brout since deceased) – were announced on October 8, 2013, Higgs was nowhere to be found. He had gone to the pub.