In a forgotten corner of the universe, in a laboratory that smelled of mothballs and broken dreams, lived a researcher. A man with messy hair and a vacant look whose only company was a sphinx cat and a collection of test tubes that seemed to contain the essences of all the stars.
This scientist was a holdover from a bygone era, a romantic of science in a world dominated by corporations and ethics committees. Despite everything, he refused to collaborate with anyone, convinced that ideas only flourished in solitude.
His colleagues considered him an eccentric, a dreamer lost in his own theories. But our protagonist was unfazed, he was convinced that science was an art, a dance between chaos and order, and that only a solitary madman could understand its most unfathomable mysteries.
His laboratory was a labyrinth of shelves filled with dusty books, strange devices that flickered with a dim light, and bubbling potions of impossible colors. On his work table, covered in a layer of atavistic dust, lay a notebook full of scribbled equations and diagrams that only he could understand. It was his personal universe, a cosmos where elemental particles danced to the rhythm of his thoughts.
The collision of the titans
The image of the solitary scientist, working in his laboratory in search of absolute truth, is a romantic and unrealistic cliché. The history of science is replete with stories of intense rivalries between researchers, whose disputes have led to some of humanity’s most important discoveries. One of those stories was the one between the British physicists Peter Higgs (1929-2024) and Frank Close (1945).
To understand this rivalry we must immerse ourselves in the world of particle physics. For decades, scientists have been searching for the missing piece to the puzzle of the Standard Model, the theory that describes fundamental particles and the forces that govern them. That piece was the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that, according to theory, interacted with other particles, giving them mass.
In 1964 Higgs proposed a mechanism that explained how particles acquired mass; However, his idea was not immediately accepted by the entire scientific community. It was here that Frank Close came onto the scene.
Close, a brilliant physicist and excellent communicator, was quick to express his doubts about Higgs’ interpretation. He argued that the British physicist had extremely simplified his theory, to the point that there were other possible explanations for the origin of the mass.
This discrepancy gave rise to an intense debate that lasted for decades. Close became the main critic of Higgs’ theory, while the latter tenaciously defended his position. The battle was fought in the pages of scientific journals, at conferences, at symposia, and even in the media.
The Large Hadron Collider: the final verdict
For years experimental physicists worked tirelessly to find evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, was built with the primary goal of finding this elusive particle.
In 2012 came the great news that everyone was waiting for: experiments at the LHC had detected a new particle that matched the characteristics predicted for the Higgs boson. It was a historic moment for physics and, of course, a triumph for Higgs.
And the experimental confirmation of the boson that bears his name seemed to prove him right and close the debate. However, the story is not so simple, Close never denied the existence of the Higgs boson, but rather questioned the interpretation he gave. It can be said that in a sense he was right, the nature of mass remains a mystery in many ways.
In any case, the rivalry between Higgs and Close was much more than a simple scientific dispute. It was an engine that drove research in particle physics for decades and thanks to this debate, increasingly powerful particle accelerators were built and new theories were developed.
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