The Quest for the Elusive Higgs Boson, With Professor Al Goshaw, Duke Physics
(This year, we're doing brief blogpost recaps of our seminars. If you'd like to write one for an upcoming seminar, let us know!)
Tori started the seminar by asking the room, on a scale of 0 to 5, to rate how much they knew about the Higgs Boson. 0’s and 1’s were most common, and even the physicists in the audience were hesitant to say anything higher than 3. Particle physics is intimidating stuff.
To ease us into the topic, Prof. Goshaw gave an abbreviated history of physics, chronicling the discoveries and formalizations that led up to the relevance and pursuit of the Higgs.
For our purposes, the path to the Higgs started with Isaac Newton and his formalization of the Law of Gravity and the gravitational force.
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb formalized the electrical force (with an equation that frankly looks like he just changed some of the letters in Newton’s).
Carl Gauss proposed the existence of electric fields in space. The idea of forces between objects having associated fields would be important later to the proposal of the Higgs Boson.
André-Marie Ampère similarly proposed the magnetic force and the existence of magnetic fields.
Michael Faraday demonstrated electromagnetic induction, whereby the motion of a magnetic field can generate a current in a wire. This is how most electrical generators work.
James Maxwell did a neat bit of blackboard math and worked out a unified theory of electromagnetism, expressible in four equations. This tied together the work of Coulomb, Gauss, Ampere, and Faraday into a coherent vision, but didn’t account for Newton’s gravity. It was still a useful little pile of math, allowing such feats as the calculation of “c” (the speed of light, which will reappear, squared, in two more scientists).
Marie Curie discovered natural radioactivity and with it a new kind of force: the weak nuclear force.
Albert Einstein and his blackboard set out to answer the question “We know the speed of light. But what is the speed of light relative to?” The answer turned out to be “everything” and from this work came general relativity, special relativity, and the famous E=mc2.
In the 1960’s, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam extended Maxwell’s unified theory to include Curie’s weak nuclear force. This resulted in the “Electroweak Theory of the Standard Model”, on which we’ve more or less been operating since. The problem with this model, however, was that it only technically works if all the particles have zero mass.
Which brings us to Peter Higgs. Higgs proposed a new kind of field (like the electric and magnetic fields before) that would grant mass to particles and patch up the problems with the Standard Model. The fantastical thing is that this field (the Higgs field) and the particle that carries its effect (the Higgs Boson) were proposed out of mathematical necessity, not physical observation. Almost fifty years of science and engineering have gone into designing an experiment (CERN) powerful enough to blast a Higgs Boson into observability.
On July 4, 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN presented observations of a particle that matches the predicted properties of the Higgs Boson, and Peter Higgs was there to hear it.
(For more, but still approachable, details on physics and politics this Science article is a fine place to start.)
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