Books and Arts; Quantum physics

House of dreams；Scientists race to explain why the Higgs boson matters

Higgs Force: The Symmetry-Breaking Force that Makes the World an Interesting Place. By Nicholas Mee.

The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments. By Jim Baggott.

The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe. By Frank Close.

Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science. By Ian Sample.

Physicists rarely become household names. Pretty much anyone watching television in Britain will have heard of Brian Cox who is credited with making physics sexy again. But before him you would probably have to go back a century or so to Albert Einstein, or three centuries to Isaac Newton, to find a name that is universally recognised. One day, though, Peter Higgs and his eponymous boson might outshine them all.

Mr Higgs's road to stardom began with a short, equation-riddled paper published in 1964. In it he predicted the existence of a particle which gives other subatomic species their mass. The challenge Mr Higgs set ultimately led to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, illustrated above) the most ambitious—and, at SFr10 billion ($10 billion) the most expensive—scientific experiment in history. It has also sparked a mini-publishing boom of books to explain what all the fuss is about.

In “Higgs Force” Nicholas Mee, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society with a doctorate in theoretical particle physics from Cambridge University, lays out why the Higgs matters, and what is being done to find it. The LHC smashes together subatomic particles called protons in a 27km underground circular tunnel outside Geneva at within a whisker of the speed of light. Its scientists then study the detritus in cathedral-sized detectors.

As Mr Mee explains, the elusive particle is believed to be the physical manifestation of the so-called Higgs field, which has pervaded the universe since shortly after the Big Bang. In the beginning, all particles were massless. This, as any physicist will tell you, is the same as saying they zipped around at the speed of light; a massive particle, by contrast, is by definition more sluggish. When the universe's temperature dropped below 1 trillion degrees or so, though, it underwent a phase transition: suddenly the Higgs field flipped on and some particles, but not others, began interacting with Higgs bosons. Those that did slowed down. In other words, they gained mass. As a consequence, some kind of primordial symmetry was, to use physicists' jargon, “spontaneously broken”. If this sounds abstruse, Mr Mee shows how it led to the formation of complex atoms, and thus all of life—which explains why some call the Higgs the “god particle”. The author also offers an inkling of the underlying maths in terms of elementary algebra. (Though he or his editor could have had more faith in readers and not relegated this to an appendix.)

Those seeking to place the Higgs within a broader context of physical theory may prefer “The Quantum Story” by Jim Baggott, another former researcher turned science writer. The particle is the cornerstone of the “standard model”, a 40-year-old mathematical blueprint for the way elementary particles behave. Mr Baggott captures its development in 40 key moments. It is not an easy read, but one that readers who are undeterred by having to learn about “eigenvalues” or “asymptotic freedom” will find intellectually gratifying.

Without the Higgs to spur spontaneous symmetry-breaking, it turns out, the edifice of fundamental physics—and no fewer than eight of the Nobel prizes awarded to 20 physicists over 35 years—would stand on shaky ground. No wonder boffins have their eye on the news from Geneva.

If the LHC does find the Higgs, which the latest results suggest it might, its media-shy originator will certainly be summoned to the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. There he may well share the podium with two others. (A Nobel prize is often awarded to one person, but if there are multiple winners it can be shared by no more than three people.) Given that there are four other possible candidates, the question pondered by Frank Close, in particular, is which two would deserve it.

Mr Close recounts his tale in some detail. His title, “The Infinity Puzzle”, refers to efforts to rid quantum physics of “unruly infinities” that crop up because the laws of quantum mechanics require physicists who are calculating how a particle will behave to consider an infinite number of possible scenarios. The Higgs mechanism played an important role in the development of a mathematical trick called “renormalisation”, which makes these sums manageable.

Scientists, not surprisingly, are no different from other people. Some jockey for kudos while other (often more deserving) candidates are left behind. Thus, in 1964, six theorists came up with similar ideas about particle physics and submitted their papers within the space of a month. In Brussels Fran?ois Englert and Robert Brout published a paper outlining much the same mechanism as Mr Higgs, though they did it several weeks before him. Tom Kibble, Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen at Imperial College in London published theirs a couple of weeks after him. (Brout died in 2011, but the four others are still alive—and all are in the running for the Nobel prize.)

One reason for Mr Higgs's pre-eminence is that he was the only one to postulate a new particle, though this was something he added only after a journal rejected an earlier draft of his paper for lacking a “practical application” (by which physicists mean a testable claim). Another reason, Mr Close points out, is a mix-up in one much-cited paper from 1967 by another future Nobel-prize winner, Steve Weinberg, which stated wrongly that Mr Higgs's article had been published before the one by the two Brussels scientists.

Mr Close, an accomplished particle physicist in his own right, enjoyed unprecedented access to all the principal players, many of whom he either knows well or, like Mr Higgs, has spoken to at length. He also appears to have left no relevant academic paper, no conference proceedings, memoir or other publicly available source unturned. This painstaking attention to historical detail yields many gems (for instance, a postal strike in Britain meant that the trio at Imperial College learned of the Higgs and Brout-Englert papers weeks after the rest of the world). It can, though, get in the way of the narrative.

For a less daunting take on the same topic, readers should try “Massive”, an entertaining yarn published in 2010 by Ian Sample, science correspondent for the Guardian, a London newspaper. Mr Sample also tracked down many of those involved, including Mr Higgs. But Mr Close's magisterial work is sure to become the definitive account of the story. It offers no unambiguous advice to the Nobel committee. But the judges would be wise to give it a thorough read anyway.