2024-04-22 12:31:00
- There are so many Nobel Prize winners who “stick” the award in your face, but this was not in the style of Peter Higgs, the famous scientist tells “24 hours-168 stories”
- They last saw each other 2-3 years ago, the 90-year-old researcher was unable to move, but still cheerful and smiling
Prof. John Ellis is the world’s most quoted physicist of all time, he is also the man who coined the term “Theory of Everything”. Ellis is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College London, recipient of the prestigious Maxwell and Paul Dirac awards. He was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire by the Queen in 1985 and the Institute of Physics in 1991. and is an honorary fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.When asked how he met Peter Higgs, Prof. Ellis replied that they first met when Higgs was lecturing at a summer school in physics.
Physics has lost a great prophet who sorted out a super puzzle with which the geniuses of this science, led by Albert Einstein, have been puzzling for years. In 1964, the modest Peter Higgs, searching for the missing piece, assumed that some different particle must exist. It should provide answers to major questions, including how the universe and atoms work. The scientist makes calculations, publishes the article, but his bold hypothesis attracts the attention of few – perhaps that is why it has been collecting dust in the scientific archives for 50 years. Only dedicated particle hunters like Prof. John Ellis, who is today the most cited physicist in the world and was kind enough to tell “24 Hours – 168 Stories” about his memories of the Higgs and those interesting times, are interested in it.
And they are extremely curious, because in 2012 a real nuclear bomb exploded in the world of science. With a spectacular experiment, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) discovered the God particle in question predicted by Prof. Higgs.
So today physicists around the world mourn this dedicated researcher who turned science on its head and showed that well-prepared minds thinking “outside the box” can make bold predictions and one day have them come true.
The British scientist whose theory won him a Nobel Prize has passed away quietly at the age of 94 at home. On this occasion, “24 hours – 168 stories” contacted Prof. Ellis, who is the living history of CERN and is among the few scientists who appreciated the potential of the Higgs theory back in the 1960s.
“I’m not sure of the exact date, it must have been in the late 1970s or maybe 1980,” Prof Ellis elaborated. Higgs was then giving a lecture at a science event in Scotland. Coincidentally or not, at that moment Peter Higgs was involved in the provision of drinks, which for a country like Scotland was of particular importance, jokes the scientist: “As a person, Higgs was extremely modest. He did not like to stand out. There are so many Nobel Prize winners who really they “stick” the award in the face. But all this was not Peter Higgs’ style at all. Sometimes people describe him as humble. I’m not quite sure, but rather modest is really the right word, and I think he was. He always had a friendly smile on his face, spoke in a soft voice.”
When they meet, Prof. Ellis has just written a paper on the phenomenology of the Higgs boson. “And I think he was, in his own quiet way, happy to see that at least some people were taking his ideas seriously,” recalls Prof Ellis.
The two continued to keep in touch and saw each other two or three years ago: “I was in Edinburgh to take part in a conference at the Higgs Center for Theoretical Physics. I took the time to visit him at his apartment. He wasn’t very mobile then. He didn’t go out. But you know, mentally he was fine and quite cheerful, smiling.”
The two talked for about an hour and it was a friendly meeting.
Asked what Peter Higgs’ main contribution was, Prof Ellis says the Higgs boson turns out to be a key particle: “Without this theory atoms could not exist and radioactivity would be as significant a force as electromagnetism. The Higgs mechanism gives masses to fundamental particles like the electron, and so if the Higgs boson wasn’t there, the electron would have no mass and the electrons would “run away”. It actually keeps the electrons around the nuclei because, on the other hand, what holds the nuclei together ? The strong nuclear interactions. There are so many different aspects of the Standard Model that are essential to the existence of atoms. It’s fair to say that without the Higgs boson they wouldn’t exist.”
The particle is also extremely important to the functioning of the universe – in fact, the Higgs boson is key to how it works.
There are four basic forces in nature – gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear interaction. The purpose of the Standard Model is to tie together these forces that determine the behavior of fundamental particles. However, he would only be able to unify these interactions in one situation – if the particles had no mass. However, this threatens the whole theory. This is where the field proposed by Peter Higgs, which gives particles mass and explains why they have mass and photons (and gluons) do not, comes to the rescue.
Although similar ideas floated in the minds of other scientists, only the Higgs was far-sighted enough to admit that there must be such a type of particle.
When CERN started looking for it, they smashed protons flying towards each other at near the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider. However, the boson is almost undetectable because it immediately decays into other particles. Only on July 4, 2012, the attention of intelligent “hunters” was attracted by a strange “dot”, 120 times heavier than a proton. A unique luck that seems to befall only the stubborn, daring to look for a needle in a haystack.
“This theory explains the entire functioning of the universe and certainly plays a key role,” noted Prof. Ellis. – You know that in general the macroscale evolution of the universe is governed by Albert Einstein’s equations.” The reason is that the motion of material objects and the interactions between celestial bodies obey the laws of General Relativity. In turn, the functioning of the stars in its deepest essence depends on the balance between General Relativity and the weak interactions responsible for radioactivity, magnetic and nuclear forces.From this point of view they all exist in dynamic balance.
“And of course, the Higgs boson plays a central role because in addition to determining the mass of the electron, it also controls the strength of radioactivity,” says Prof. Ellis. “If there were no Higgs field and bosons responsible for the weak interactions, the particles involved would be massless.”
When asked how a person more than half a century ago could make such precise calculations that were later confirmed experimentally, Ellis says that Peter Higgs did not initially think about how the theory would work on the scale of the universe or in cosmology: “He focused on a lot a specific problem in our theory of particles and interactions. Physicists have long been trying to solve a relatively technical problem in quantum field theory. A type of vector particles that carry fundamental interactions. Thanks to this, it was suggested that there must be some analogous mechanism. But there were also arguments that this was impossible. And then Peter Higgs came along and pointed out that there was a loophole in the impossibility argument. And then in a second paper he proposed a very specific and simple model that uses exactly that.”
Many scientists then made Higgs-like assumptions, but none indicated that a massive scalar particle existed. Except for the Higgs. Unlike many of his colleagues, he published relatively few scientific articles.
“It’s like he’s exhausted,” suggested Prof. Higgs. “I never asked him that because it would be a rude question.”
When his theory was confirmed and the whole world began to talk about the discovery of the God particle, he did not like its name, but put up with it. Of course, all this does not in the least affect the enormous contribution of Peter Higgs to physics, because Prof. Ellis and his colleagues at CERN continue their frantic hunt for new particles.
Moreover, the professor continues to tirelessly explore interactions at the Large Hadron Collider and search for physics outside the Standard Model. And someday, who knows… maybe scientists will come up with something new that will unite Einstein’s theory with quantum mechanics and launch a revolutionary new era in technology.