Denis Balibouse/Reuters
Collision Course: It was the longest, most
costly manhunt in science for an elusive particle that was said to be key to the
workings of the universe. For a generation of physicists, it was an appointment
with history.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: October 7, 2013
It’s that time of year again, when physicists of a certain
age, even if they do not want to admit it, are afraid to step into their morning
shower for fear of missing the call from Stockholm.
This year the pressure is magnified if you are Peter Higgs,
84, a legendarily shy and self-effacing professor at the University of Edinburgh
whose name is attached to what is so far the landmark discovery in physics this
century: a particle said to be the key to explaining the existence of mass,
diversity and — yes — life in the universe, the Higgs boson. Most people
know it as the “God particle.”
Dr. Higgs — the J. D. Salinger of physics — has
already let it be known that he will not be available in any form on Tuesday.
But if you believe the oddsmakers, the news media and the self-appointed
prognosticators, Dr. Higgs is a lock to join the immortals on Tuesday, when this
year’s Nobel Prize in Physics will
be announced. The announcement had been scheduled for 5:45 a.m. Eastern time but
was delayed by at least an hour.
But he will not be the only one pausing by the shower.
At least four other living theorists can claim credit for coming up with the
idea of the boson — quantum-speak for a force-particle — and its mother ship,
the Higgs field, in three papers published back in 1964. Not to mention the
10,000 or so scientists who built the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the nuclear research
organization, and then sifted through two trillion subatomic collisions to find
the long-sought particle. According to tradition, a maximum of three living
people can share the award.
It is rare that there is an obvious candidate for the
physics prize. Many people think it would be crazy for the Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences not to recognize the rock star event of the decade, but nothing is
ever for certain.
On July 4, 2012, physicists working at CERN in
Switzerland announced that they had discovered a particle matching the
description of the Higgs boson. The news sparked headlines and set Champagne
fountains around the world flowing. It also started a widespread debate about
who would win the Nobel Prize, if the work panned out, which it has.
Betting pools like Ladbrokes in London and other
prognosticators have named Dr. Higgs the leading candidate. As he once told The
Guardian newspaper, speaking of the boson that bears his name: “It has
consequences. If it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be here.” (Indeed, a Scientific
American blog put up a joke article saying the
prize had been awarded to the subatomic particle itself.)
Besides Dr. Higgs, the other theorists with good
claims to the particle are François Englert and his colleague Robert Brout of
the Université Libre de Bruxelles; the team of Tom Kibble of Imperial College
London; Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester; and Gerald Guralnik of Brown
University. Dr. Brout died in 2011, so he is not eligible for the prize.
Other theorists who get mentioned sometimes in the
Higgs conversation are Jeffrey Goldstone of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, whose work in the early 1960s drove much of the theoretical work of
Dr. Higgs and the others, and Philip W. Anderson of Princeton, already a Nobel
laureate, whose work on superconductivity in 1963 helped point the way for Dr.
Higgs.
As for the experimentalists, here is where the Nobel
tradition of the one genius meets the reality of collaborative modern science,
and the oddsmakers throw up their hands. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, which has
been given to groups, the physics prize so far has always gone to people. One
solution would be to give the prize to the leaders of the two collaborations,
CMS and Atlas, that found the boson. As of the July announcement, they were
Joseph Incandela of CMS and Fabiola Gianotti of Atlas — but the leadership
revolves, so winning would be a fluke of timing.
Another would be to give it to the leaders of CERN:
the director general, Rolf Dieter-Heuer, who muscled the two giant
collaborations to the finish line; Lyn Evans, who oversaw the building of the
Large Hadron Collider from its beginnings; and Steve Myers, who wrote the first
paper proposing what would become the Large Hadron Collider back in 1984 and has
kept the machine running. But that would leave out the unsung heroes and
graduate students who did the work.
An informal survey of physics insiders this summer
found widespread doubt that the Royal Academy would be able to find a way to
“narrow the circle,” as one physicist put it. Most seem to agree that if any
prize is given for the theory, Dr. Higgs should be part of it. Often Dr. Englert
is also mentioned. He and Dr. Brout beat Dr. Higgs to the punch back in 1964,
limning the notion of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates
space and imbues elementary particles with mass, but they did not explicitly
point out that there was a new particle associated with that force field, the
one we now call the Higgs, although they have argued that it was implicit in the
math.
Drs. Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble were the last to weigh
in, and although they did mention the new boson, they have fought to be included
in the glory. Reached last week, Dr. Hagen said his expectations were low. If
there is a third theorist from 1964, it might likely be Dr. Kibble, who has a
long and distinguished career.
In 2004, Drs. Higgs, Brout and Englert won the Wolf
Prize, considered to be a forerunner of the Nobel. In 2010, Drs. Higgs, Brout,
Englert, Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble shared the Sakurai Prize of the American
Physical Society, another important forerunner, and the first time that prize
had been split six ways.
This year, the European Physical Society gave its high
energy and particle physics prize to the Atlas and CMS collaborations, naming
the founders of those experiments, Michel Della Negra, Peter Jenni and Tejinder
Virdee.
In an e-mail, Dr. Jenni wrote, “I honestly hope that
the Nobel will this year go to those who motivated us to start the LHC
adventure.” He named Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert specifically, adding, “These
gentlemen are already old, no point to wait longer!”
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