The scientist possibly most angry with the popularity of his discovery has died, at the age of 94: the so-called Higgs boson, nicknamed the God particle. This is the British Peter Ware Higgs, a non-fundamentalist atheist, as he defined himself. The elementary particle that he postulated, along with other theoretical physicists, almost half a century before it was discovered ended up being named after him. Higgs managed to get his alleged delusion published in fits and starts, and it soon sparked controversy. In fact, that ghostly particle was called (the authorship is in question, but it could be due to another great physicist, Leon Max Lederman) the goddamn particle. That is to say, the damn particle, or even better, the devilish particle, nothing could be further from the pious name that he ended up congealing, raising it to the altars that were so far from its author: the God particle or particle of God.
And since we are with God, let's say that one of the most fascinating insights of the authors of the Bible is contained in the third verse of Genesis. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. We better leave the previous two verses and the following ones because they border on delirium, but, in fact, today we know, being a little generous, that the beginning of this universe was a spontaneous generation of radiation, light if you will. A minimal fraction of this form of energy was soon transformed into matter and both expanded vertiginously. Expanding and doing so madly implies that space and time were generated in turn. All of this occurred in a tiny portion of the first second of the universe's existence.
Of the four universal foundations, energy, matter, space and time, let's focus on the second. Although, let's keep it in mind for what comes next, these four can be taken two by two: energy and matter, on the one hand, and the seat in which both exist, space and time, on the other. The close relationship of the first two (also of the other two and the four among themselves, but separately) was formulated by Albert Einstein, in such a concise way that it borders on the poetic. The only verse of three letters, a symbol and a number is the equation that could well be said to have defined the 20th century and those to come: E=mc². Energy E and matter m are simply related by the speed of light in a vacuum, a huge number, squared. We know, and much more after the recent premiere of the shocking film Oppenheimer, what happens when a little matter is converted into energy. It is a much more complex question to elucidate the opposite mechanism: how on earth a necessarily enormous amount of energy congeals into matter defined by its essential magnitude: mass. The m of Einstein's equation. To face any fundamental speculation it is always advisable to look for its possible roots in classical Greece.
It was Leucippus who first conceived the idea of the atom, Democritus who reasoned it most deeply, and Titus Lucretius Carus who praised it in a profound and beautiful way in his formidable poem De rerum natura either About the nature of things. The atom, for them, was the basic and indivisible unit of matter. From the natural world. These atoms and the vacuum in which they must exist and move were reviled, from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, to name only their most distinguished opponents, for two millennia. But there they were, except that when they were discovered it was seen that they were actually divisible. First there were the electrons that, in the form of clouds, surrounded a nucleus of protons and neutrons so compactly united that they formed an extraordinarily small group. The more or less fortunate relationship that is made from the relationship of sizes is that of a fly, the nucleus, in the center of a cathedral, the electronic clouds. Three particles. But little by little, and we will have no choice but to praise the path taken, it was seen that there was or could be generated an enormous number of particles that were called elemental.
After the Big Bang, four types of particles called photons, leptons, quarks and gluons were generated in a very high-temperature plasma state. The first form (will form, as we will see) precisely the light; one of the second is the familiar electron, and the others took root very soon, forming, for example, protons and neutrons. Strictly speaking, the universe does not become luminous, transparent if you prefer, until the photons are decoupled from the others when that plasma cools sufficiently. That is when the electrons are trapped by the nuclei and true atoms are formed, those of Democritus, no matter how light they still are. About 380,000 years have passed since everything began. For all these reasons, these four are the ones that must be considered authentic “atoms” or primitive elementary particles. But soon many more particles were postulated and discovered. And its antiparticles, but their history was very ephemeral.
The journey of exploration that humanity began was the opposite of that which had begun many centuries before: instead of going towards the immensely large, it went to scrutinize the extremely tiny. Instead of telescopes, particle accelerators had to be used, converting a shocking electricity company bill, energy, into a few particles to be studied in huge detectors. It was about exploring not only the intimacy of matter, but its fundamental consequence: the true origin of the universe. It was like, allow the brutal metaphor, crashing two antique pocket watches with precise mechanics against each other. From the pieces that were jumping everywhere, we had to deduce the mechanism that made them work. It was soon seen that the more violent these collisions were, the more different pieces jumped after the explosion. The world of elementary particles was nourished far beyond what was expected. The race that was established by increasing collision energy with increasingly powerful (and more expensive) accelerators ended up being won by Europe. And the prize was precisely finding the Higgs boson. Although there was another more subtle reward of which we should feel even more proud: CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) was the first embryo of European unity together with the Coal and Steel Community.
As the number of particles that were discovered increased, what would end up being called the Standard Model was developed to describe their properties and dynamics. It was a daunting task, but it was completed by providing it with a prediction capacity of astonishing accuracy. But one detail was missing: let's say the anchor and the spring whose mechanism was at the base of the clock's operation.
The particles of that rich microcosm differed in very few properties, but the fundamental and most defining of each and every one of them was their mass. How had such a variety arisen, ranging from zero to enormous numbers? Higgs, the Belgians Brout and Englert and a few other physicists proposed a way.
The Big Bang was not perfect, but very slight imperfections called symmetry violations, led to that exuberant variety of particles. And the void in which everything unfolded was something much more complex than nothing. In fact, it must have been completely full, like Aristotelian ether, although they were nothing alike. What ended up being called the Higgs field, which like any field in physics can be conceived as particles, in this case the type called by the general term bosons, was the one that gave masses to the other particles. The more intense their interaction was with those bosons of that primordial field, or, in another metaphor, the more will rub The incipient particle with that field, the more mass it acquired when it hatched. The anchor and the dock.
Very little by little, even with indifference, it was accepted that it was a valid mechanism. The problem was that, conceiving that field as a particle in itself, there was no idea what its own mass could be. That is to say, it could well be unattainable with current technology. However, CERN managed to convince European politicians to finance what was possibly one of humanity's most fascinating scientific adventures. I was a direct witness, because I was there that December 1994, of the euphoria that was unleashed throughout the center, particularly in the TH division, the theoretical physics division, when the council approved the budget for the LHC, the largest collider in the world. watches of history. And there arose less than a decade later the devilish particle that ended up being sanctified. Praise and glory, that is: the Nobel Prize, for Higgs, François Englert and CERN itself. Pride for Europe.
Rest in peace Peter Higgs.
Manuel Lozano Leyva He is an emeritus professor of Atomic and Nuclear Physics at the University of Seville. His last book is The sorceress, the cat and the demon, from Zeno of Elea to Stephen Hawking: The twelve imagined experiments that changed history (Debate, 2023)
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