The elusive Mr Higgs

It was in 1964 that Higgs, then a 35-year-old assistant professor at the University of Edinburgh, predicted the existence of a new particle — now known as the Higgs boson, or the ‘God particle’ — that would explain how other particles get mass. Half a century later, on July 4, 2012, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away a tear as he sat in a lecture hall at CERN, the European Organisation of Nuclear Research in Geneva, and heard that his particle had finally been found.

Higgs, now 85, doesn’t own a television or use email or a cellphone. Not that he is uninformed about the world around him. Over lunch recently, he and a colleague, Alan Walker, spent half an hour parsing the implications of Scottish independence from Britain, finally rejected. But his public appearances are as rare and fleeting as the tracks of an exotic particle in the underground detectors of CERN.

As a result of his bubblelike existence, Higgs doesn’t really know how much commotion his award has caused, said Walker, a physics professor at Edinburgh.

Higgs was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, in 1929, the son of a BBC engineer. His interest in physics was tweaked when he realised he was in the same school as had been once attended by Paul Dirac, the British theorist who was the father of quantum field theory, which describes the forces of nature as a game of catch between force-carrying bits of energy called bosons.

Now retired, he lives in a fifth-floor flat in the city’s historic New Town neighbourhood. When he invented his boson in 1964, he said, “I wasn’t sure it would be important.”

According to theory, bosons should be massless, like the photon that transmits light. But while light crosses the universe, the strong force barely reaches across an atomic nucleus, which by quantum rules meant the particle carrying it should be almost as massive as a whole proton.

Higgs suggested that space was filled with an invisible field of energy. It would act on some particles trying to move through it, sort of like an entourage attaching itself to a celebrity.

In some situations, he noted, a bit of this field could flake off and appear as a new particle, what would come to be called the Higgs boson. His first paper was rejected. He rewrote it, spicing it up with a new paragraph at the end, emphasising the new particle.

It turned out that François Englert and Robert Brout of the Free University of Brussels beat him to print by seven weeks with the same idea, although they were not as emphatic about the new particle. “They were first,” said Higgs, adding that he did not know that until told as much by the journal that published it.

Shortly thereafter, three more physicists — Tom Kibble of Imperial College London, Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester and Gerald Guralnik of Brown University —  chimed in. Englert shared the Nobel last year with Higgs; Brout had died.

But Higgs’s work turned out to be irrelevant to research on the strong force, which was ultimately transformed by the discovery of quarks.

Higgs said that Benjamin Lee, a Fermilab physicist, first called it the Higgs boson at a conference around 1972, perhaps because Higgs’s paper was listed first in Weinberg’s paper. The name stuck, not just to the particle, but to the molasses-like field that produced it and the mechanism by which that field gave mass to other particles. His lack of research though has kept him out of the fray and the fury that has resulted from the discovery of the boson.
The Higgs boson was the final piece of what physicists have come to call the Standard Model, which sums up knowledge of the forces and particles of nature. But it is incomplete, not explaining, for example, why there is anything in the universe at all, or what dark matter or dark energy is. Moreover, lacking any evidence of a more encompassing theory, physicists can’t explain the mass itself, which calculations suggest should be almost infinite. This has led some theorists to propose that our universe is the only one in an ensemble of universes, the multiverse, in which the value of things like the Higgs is random.

Asked about that, Higgs lit up with a big grin. “I’m not a believer,” he said. “It’s hard enough to have a theory for one universe.”