The God particle and beyond. A tribute to Peter Higgs

The death of Peter Higgs on Tuesday 9 April, 2024, gave rise to attempts to explain his contribution to our understanding of the nature of the fundamental forces of the Universe. The eulogies affirm his status of a giant in the field. The attempts to explain that contribution to the layman have faced considerable difficulties.

I have tried to explain the limits to current understanding, and the need to rethink our deeplyheld assumptions about reality.

I write as one such layman, albeit it one with a PhD in radiation chemistry. In some mitigation, the entire theory of the fundamental building blocks of the Universe has changed dramatically by the work of theoretical and experimental physicists over the last fifty years. I can do no more than to outline how commentators have grappled with communicating the work which earned Peter Higgs his Nobel Prize in 2013. His ideas transformed thinking about how particles acquire mass.

I remembered a popularisation of the subject by Leon Lederman, a contemporary Nobel laureate in the same area of research, Leon Lederman. In his book coauthored by science writer Dick Teresi, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? he claims he gave the Higgs Boson the lighthearted label of The god particle because
QUOTE This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle partly because the publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. END QUOTE

Then the Guardian published an obituary for Peter Higgs, on Wednesday 10 April. It gave the expected life story for ann obituary. However, understandably, it offered little insight into that Goddamned particle.
It quoted his Nobel Prize commendation describing how QUOTE the standard model of physics rests on the existence of a special kind of particle the Higgs particle which originates from an invisible field that fills up all space without it we would not exist because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass. The theory proposed by by Englert and Higgs describes this process END QUOTE.

Confused? I was. The following day, the Guardian published a second obituary. This was by Francis Close, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and a hugely experienced scientist including time at CERN where the experiments confirming the Higgs’ Boson theory was carried out.

The Professor adds rather more to this reader’s understanding of Peter Higgs and his discovery.
QUOTE The so-called Higgs mechanism controls the rate of thermal nuclear fusion that powers the Sun … The voracity of the mechanism was proved with the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson.
Higgs had justifiable claims because he drew attention to the fact that in certain circumstances the so-called mathematical symmetries required for the standard scientific theory of physics appear to be broken. Furthermore he saw the implication of such proposed behaviours could imply the appearance of a massive particle who is affinity for interacting with all other particles would be in proportion to their masses..END QUOTE

For me, this description adds considerably to the earlier obituary. It suggests in a complicated way the clarification of the great discovery for which Peter Higgs received his Nobel prize.
I returned to other sources of information to help me further in my search for understanding. I began with another book by a distinguished physicist. The author is Carlo Rovelli, and his book is called ‘Reality is not what it seems’.

I have no doubt I need to study Rovelli more carefully even to understand Rovelli. His book takes us beyond even the obituaries in explaining the Higgs mechanism. In the concluding part of the book on quantum space and relational time he points to the difficulties faced in understanding such matters.
“To comprehend what quantum space and quantum time are, we need one more to revise in depth the way we conceive things. We need to rethink the grammar of our understanding of the world.”
And that is where my journey and our journey together have reached at present. To understand more about the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs Boson requires that rethinking of our understanding of the world. I have had a glimpse of the next steps needed to make progress in that understanding.
I hope it has been as useful an exercise to others as it has been to myself.