THE HIGGS BOSON OR THE GOD PARTICLE: THE SECRET, INVISIBLE FORCE FIELD RUNNING THE UNIVERSE. (Pardon me for my temerity! An ex-banker is not qualified to talk on the subject!) 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 tell-tale 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. Elementary particles — the electrons and other subatomic riffraff running around in our universe— would get their masses from interacting with this field, the way politicians draw succor from cheers and handshakes at the rope line. Without this mystery field, everything in the universe would be pretty much the same, a bland fizz of particles running around at the speed of light. But with it, there could be atoms and stars, and us. Along the way, the Higgs boson achieved a presence in pop culture rare in abstract physics. To the eternal dismay of his colleagues, Leon Lederman, the former director of Fermi lab, called it the “God particle” in his book of the same name, written with Dick Teresi. (He later said that he had wanted to call it the “goddamn particle.”) Journalists and the news media could not resist the nickname, however, and many particle physicists grudgingly admitted that the name had brought a dose of drama and public excitement to a field almost breathtakingly austere and abstract.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 07:57:15 +0000
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