The significant discovery of the Higgs boson has been one of the principal reasons why physicists, and chemists alike, were so excited about the LHC; and thus, within the scientific community the announcement was a cause for a major celebration indeed. For most of the general public, however, while the announcement was certainly intriguing, there were many basic questions yet to be answered: Just what was the Higgs boson, and why had it been labeled the God particle? Why were physicists expecting to find it, and what did the discovery really mean?
Jim Baggott's book 'Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle'' is a kind of remedy to this situation and provides the necessary context that the general public needs in order to understand the discovery of the Higgs boson and what it all means.
The bridge with Chemistry is in the beginning with Dirac's theory on combining Quantum Theory with Einstein's Special relativity (also his work on non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle makes a mention). The author thus says that if one wanted to study high energy particle collisions one needed to climb mountains - that would mean the presence of more such particles over the high mountains (and also the efforts).
When hosts of particles were being discovered during 1932-47, naming turned out to be a big task and Baggot comes out with the chronology of how they were named.
Baggott first takes us through the history of the development of the Standard Model (which theory the Higgs boson is a part). He begins with the discovery that atoms are made up of the more elementary particles of electrons, protons and neutrons. And then takes us through the discovery of the still more fundamental particles of quarks, leptons and bosons, and the 4 fundamental forces that govern these particles: gravity, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. As with most authors of such Physics writings, there is the account of Weinberg-Salam theory with SU(2)xU(1) that always flies above my head. But then there is good ending to it that enters the mind to satisfaction of the theory.
There is a funnier part in between the chapters that made an interesting reading. The incident relates to the Physicist Veltman who entered an elevator in the last so that the weight exceeded the limit for the elevator to take off. Not relenting to this hang-on, he asked one of the persons inside to press the 'ON' button as soon as he would command that. Saying that he jumped into the air inside the Lift. Lo, the elevator worked out. If a person falls freely he will not feel his weight.
The Feynman quote that a proton-proton collision is like smashing two pocket watches together to see how are they put together also made an interesting insight.
While we know that the atom is 99% empty, the revelation that pulling a quark from interior of nucleon is done with the creation of anti-quark whose immediate pairing leads to a meson, makes a sensible answer to the vast emptiness we have been visualizing. This is further explained with the fact that the mass of 2 up-quark is 4.5 - 9.9 MeV and the rest of the proton mass comes from the energy of Gluon fields inside the proton whose mass comes out to be 938 MeV!
For instance, and of crucial importance here, is that--after learning of the 3 types of elementary particles, and the 4 basic forces-- we learn that there was a problem with the then-current theory regarding the masses of the elementary particles- in that the 4 forces alone were simply unable to account for it. In order to overcome this difficulty, some physicists postulated that there must be a charged field pervading space, since such a field appeared to be the only appealing way to solve the mass mystery. This field was called the Higgs field.
A part of the book warranted fast reading as it was with the funding allocation and political deliberations.
A $15 billion project in the end it took 2 decades of untiring efforts by armies of physicists, engineers, construction workers etc. About 10000 tonnes of liquid Nitrogen and 150 tonnes of Liquid Helium ( A leakage of Helium alone caused a damage to about 53 magnets) was pumped into the LHC magnets that ran across 27 Km and was commissioned by August 2008, with the discovery of the Higgs particle by 2012 with more than 100 authors contributing to it! Used by Weinberg and Salam to account for electro-weak symmetry breaking this boson is having a spin 0 and a mass of about 125 GeV
This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that he gave it a nickname: the God Particle. Good read above all.
