The “God particle” became the prize particle on Tuesday. Chasing the Higgs The story behind the hunt for the very fabric of existence itself. Interactive Why Is the Higgs the ‘Higgs’? Multimedia Interactive Graphic What Is the Higgs? Collision Course Related Times Topic: Higgs Boson For 3 Nobel Winners, a Molecular Mystery Solved (October 8, 2013) Related in Opinion Op-Ed Contributor: No Physicist Is an Island (October 9, 2013) Science Twitter Logo. Connect With Us on Social Media @nytimesscience on Twitter. Science Reporters and Editors on Twitter Like the science desk on Facebook. Enlarge This Image Fabrice Coffrini/A.F.P. — Getty Images Peter W. Higgs, right, and François Englert at a conference in Switzerland on July 4, 2012. Readers’ Comments "An astounding scientific achievement by two dedicated researchers. Explaining their breakthrough for all to understand is the challenge. " Pancha Chandra, Brussels, Belgium Read Full Comment » Two theoretical physicists who suggested that an invisible ocean of energy suffusing space is responsible for the mass and diversity of the particles in the universe won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday morning. They are Peter W. Higgs, 84, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and François Englert, 80, of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. The theory, elucidated in 1964, sent physicists on a generation-long search for a telltale particle known as the Higgs boson, popularly known (though not among physicists) as the God particle. The chase culminated last year with the discovery of this particle, which confers mass on other particles, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland. Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert will split a prize of $1.2 million, to be awarded in Stockholm on Dec. 10. “You may imagine that this is not unpleasant,” Dr. Englert said in an early morning news conference. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had not been able to contact Dr. Higgs, who had vowed he would not be available Tuesday. A friend and fellow physicist, Alan Walker, said in a phone interview on Tuesday morning that Dr. Higgs, who does not use a cellphone or a computer, had gone off by himself for a few days without saying where, and that he would return Friday. Dr. Higgs, he said, is a modest man who likes his own company and the ability to come and go without a fuss. Even before the announcement, he said, one journalist had invaded Dr. Higgs’s building looking for an interview. “He was sent away with a flea in his ear,” Dr. Walker said. In a statement released later by the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Higgs pronounced himself “overwhelmed,” saying, “I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.” The prize had been expected ever since physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider announced on July 4, 2012, that they had discovered a particle matching the description of the Higgs. Thousands of particle physicists worked on the project, and for many of them the Nobel is a crowning validation. Fabiola Gianotti, who led one of the teams at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, called the prize “a great emotion and a great satisfaction,” adding that it was nice that the experiments were cited in the award. “The young physicists are superexcited.” The Higgs was the last missing ingredient of the Standard Model, a suite of equations that has ruled particle physics for the last half-century, explaining everything from the smell of a rose to the ping when your computer boots up. According to this model, the universe brims with energy that acts like a cosmic molasses, imbuing the particles that move through it with mass, the way a bill moving through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous and controversial. Without the Higgs field, many elementary particles, like electrons, would be massless and would zip around at the speed of light. There would be no atoms and no us. For scientists, the discovery of the Higgs (as physicists call it) affirmed the view of a cosmos ruled by laws of almost diamond-like elegance and simplicity, but in which everything interesting — like us — is a result of lapses or flaws in that elegance. That is the view that emerged in a period of feverish and tangled progress after World War II, in which the world’s physicists turned their energies from war to looking under the hood of nature, using the tools of quantum field theory. At the heart of this quest was an ancient idea, the concept of symmetry, and how it was present in the foundations of physics but hidden in the world as we experience it. In art and nature, something is symmetrical if it looks the same when you move it one way or another, like a snowflake rotated 60 degrees; in science and math, a symmetry is something that does not change when you transform the system, like the length of an arrow when you turn it around or shoot it. In 1954, the theorists Chen Ning Yang and Robert L. Mills at the Brookhaven National Laboratory concluded that all fundamental forces were the result of nature’s trying to maintain symmetries — for example, the conservation of electric charge in the case of electromagnetism, or the conservation of momentum and energy in the case of Einstein’s gravity.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:50:15 +0000
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