Peter Higgs: A Biography and Crash Course in Subatomic Particle Theory

At 81, far from relaxing in a rocking chair with a pipe and an afternoon of Poirot, Professor Peter Higgs is still at the forefront of theoretical particle physics in Edinburgh. Having devoted his life to hypothetical physics, Professor Higgs is now widely known for his theory of the W and Z bosons, elementary particles that explain how the universe holds together. Since CERN’s (European Organization for Nuclear Research) opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its subsequent announcement in 2008 to search for the elusive Higgs boson particle, Professor Higgs has been busy explaining the theory of the ‘God particle’ to the masses.

Born in Newcastle in 1929, the Second World War interrupted young Higgs’ schooling, yet he graduated with a first class honours degree in Physics and subsequent masters and PhD, all from King’s College London. Whilst studying, he hitchhiked to the Scottish capital for the Edinburgh Fringe festival and fell in love with the city, later becoming a senior research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He then held various posts at both University College London and Imperial College London until 1960, when he returned to the University of Edinburgh as a Mathematical Physics lecturer. Professor Higgs was promoted to a Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh in 1980. He later became a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Institute of Physics, and was awarded the Rutherford Medal and Prize in 1984. Upon retirement, he became an Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Prior to characterising what the Higgs boson particle is, we must first investigate the four fundamental forces of physics and bosons in general. Physics defines the four forces upon which nature is based as gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. Each of these forces has a particle associated with it. Gravity, which is the force of attraction between all masses in the universe, has the hypothetical graviton. Electromagnetism is carried out by photons. A photon is an elementary particle that is essentially a packet of energy that is the basis for light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The strong force is the interaction between protons and neutrons, which allows the nucleus to form. There are eight kinds of gluons which mediate the strong force; a gluon is essentially the glue which holds the components of the nucleus of an atom together. The weak force is caused by the exchange of heavy W and Z bosons, which are carrier particles of the weak force and transmit radiation.

Professor Higgs developed the idea that particles had no mass when the universe began and that it was a fraction of a second later that the particles interacted with the ‘Higgs field’, thus gaining a mass. Based on David J. Miller’s analogy, all massless particles at time zero are students arranged in a room, each only talking to its nearest neighbour. Then one particle, the lecturer, comes into the room and starts to cross it—all the nearby students aggregate and stick together around him; thus the lecturer gains mass. As he gains mass, he gains momentum as he crosses the room (momentum is mass multiplied by speed), and so it becomes more difficult for the lecturer to stop. This Higgs mechanism explains the massless particles gaining mass a fraction of a second after the universe is born—when a particle moves through a field, it distorts it slightly, and this local clumping together of the field around the particle results in a mass being generated for the particle.

Unfortunately, there seems to be an irritating correlation in the modern physics world between the size of the thing you are looking for and the cost of trying to find it: the smaller the particle, the bigger the price tag of building a facility to find it. The Higgs boson is an elementary particle, one of the smallest possible particles to search for. It is fitting that the LHC is like a small town, employing 3000 people and with an underground tunnel 26 kilometres long encircling it like a ring road. The LHC aims to find the ‘God particle’ and so prove Higgs’ theory. The price of this knowledge justifies the scale of the LHC.

Professor Higgs has greatly contributed to the theories upon which particle physics are based; the explanation for how particles can go from being massless to obtaining mass through the distortion of local fields. Now that, my friend, was a crash course in basic particle physics, something upon which everything we see around us is based, but yet a subject most of us do not dare even pretend to understand. Thankfully, there are scientists like Higgs who devote years to the theorising and explaining of why atoms and subatomic particles behave in the way that they do. I, for one, am grateful that the buck has not fallen with me.