Review of ELUSIVE
Discovering the Higgs Boson and other mysteries of particle physics
If you were paying even the tiniest bit of attention to science news in 2012, you surely recall the biggest news to come out of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN): the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. More than 50 years after the particle and its implications were described by Peter Higgs, physicists finally had evidence for the elusive particle. The media even dubbed it “The God Particle”.
Though the discovery of the particle is some of the biggest science news of the last century of physics, the particle and its implications were first fully described back in 1964. In Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass, Frank Close tells the story of how physics came to understand the particle, and the decades long journey to prove its existence.
This isn’t the first book I’ve read on the Higgs boson, but it is the first to really dive into the academics of the original paper. What surprised me most about Higgs’ epiphany was that his 1964 papers were a product of a few weeks of work, rather than a long, deliberate focus on a problem that occupied years of his professional life.
Some might even say Higgs’ played “a minor role” in the formulation of the Higgs boson, Higgs field, and Higgs mechanism (now named after him; Higgs didn’t name them himself). Understanding how particles get mass and the super symmetry theory of particle physics were highly active areas of research. The Higgs boson was even previously known as the Goldstone boson. But Peter found a loophole in the mathematics of the Goldstone boson, and figured out the correct solution in a matter of a couple days after reading a published paper explaining a physical paradox. His breadth of physics knowledge allowed him to solve the paradox of Goldstone’s boson, giving it mass where previously it was massless, despite that contradicting other necessary mathematics (that I won’t attempt to explain nor really understand).
The rest, as some say, is history, which culminated in the 2012 discovery at the CERN large hadron collider where evidence of the Higgs boson decay was finally detected with enough certainty to prove the existence of the boson and the Higgs field that gives particles their mass.
Aside from the physics of it all, however, I found the story of Peter himself interesting, particularly how he turned his nose at much of what academia is. He refused to publish papers for the sake of publishing them because one “needed to”. Instead, he published slowly, probably too slowly for any academic standard today. He also only solo published. And when he thought he might win the Nobel Prize in 2013 (which he did), he left his home and hid out to try an avoid the attention. Unable for anyone to reach him, he found out he won the prestigious prize after a passerby on the street recognized him and told him.
Elusive was a highly interesting book, and I learned much about the academic story of the Higgs. The book was more about the science of the Higgs and the ensuing discovery than a biography of Peter, which is probably exactly as Higgs would want it.
Published: June 2022
Format: Audio
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker (2018)
Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics by Jon Butterworth (2014)
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