38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Will-o'-the-wisp around 5 sigma: the hunting of the Higgs, November 18, 2010
This review is from: Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science (Hardcover)
"Mr. Hunter, we have rules that are not open to interpretation, personal intuition, gut feelings, hairs on the back of your neck, little devils or angels sitting on your shoulder...." - Capt. Ramsey ('Crimson Tide')
Particle physicists hunting for maddeningly elusive particles sometimes must feel like Mr. Hunter from the movie "Crimson Tide". The quarries which they are trying to mine seem so ephemeral, making their presence known in events with such slim probability margins, victims of nature's capricious dance of energy and matter, that intuition must sometimes seem as important as data. The hunt for such particles signifies some of the most intense efforts in extruding reality from nature's womb that human beings have ever put in.
No other particle exemplifies this uniquely human of all endeavors than the so-called Higgs boson. The man who bears the burden of imparting it its name is now a household name himself. Yet as the history of science often demonstrates, the real story is both more interesting and more complicated. It involves intense competition involving billions of dollars and thousands of careers of a kind rarely seen in science, and stories of glories and follies befitting the great tragedies. In his book "Massive", Ian Sample does a marvelous job of bringing this history to life.
Sample excels at three things. The first is the story of the two great laboratories that have mainly been involved in the race to the finish in discovering nature's building blocks- Fermilab and CERN. CERN was started in the 60s to give a boost to European physics after World War 2. Fermilab was lovingly built by the experimental physicist Robert Wilson, a former member of the Manhattan Project who was a first-rate amateur architect and saw accelerators as aesthetic things of beauty. Secondly, Sample does a nice job of explaining the reasons that led to the construction of these machines, the most complicated that mankind has ever constructed. Only human beings would put billions of dollars and immense manpower on the line purely for the purpose of satisfying man's curiosity of plumbing the depths of nature's deepest secrets. Sample also lays out the very human and social concerns that accompany such investigations. Lastly, Sample was lucky enough to get an extended interview with Peter Higgs, a shy man who very rarely does interviews. Higgs grew up in Scotland idolizing Paul Dirac and shared Dirac's view of a unifying beauty that would connect nature's disparate facts. In the late 1960s he wrote papers describing what is now called the Higgs boson. The papers were well-accepted in the US and Higgs's name soon began to be bandied about in seminars and meetings. As described below however, Higgs was not the only one postulating the theory.
So what exactly is the Higgs boson? A complete understanding would naturally need a background in theoretical physics, but the best analogy for the layman was given by a British physicist. Imagine a room full of young women who are happily chatting. In walks a handsome young man. As long as he is not noticed he can move freely across the room, but as soon as the young women spot him they cluster around him, impeding his movement. It's as though the young man has become heavier and has acquired mass from the "field" of women surrounding him. The Higgs then is the particle that imparts specific masses to all the other myriad particles discovered so far including quarks and leptons through its own field. It should be evident why it's important. The Higgs would be the crowning achievement in the Standard Model of particle physics which encompasses all particles and forced known until now except gravity.
However, the history of the Higgs particle is complicated. Sample does a great job of explaining why the credit belongs to six different people who reached the same conclusion that Higgs did. It seems that Higgs was not the first to publish, but he was the first one to clearly state the existence of a new particle. However, the most comprehensive theory of the Higgs field and particle came out later. If Nobel Prizes are to be awarded, it's not at all clear what three people should be picked, although Higgs's name seems obvious. The sociology of scientific discovery is as important as the facts and again illustrates that science is a much more haphazard and random process than is believed.
The search for the Higgs gathered tremendous momentum in the 80s and 90s. It intensified after accelerator laboratories spectacularly discovered two particles named the W and Z bosons that are responsible for mediating the electromagnetic and weak interactions (the electroweak force). These particles were predicted by Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow in the 60s, and their prediction surely ranks as one of the greatest theoretical successes in modern physics. Once the theory predicted the masses of these particles, they were up for grabs. No experimentalist worth his or her salt would fail to relish nailing a concrete theoretical prediction of fundamental importance through a decisive experiment. Sample captures the pulse-quickening inter-Atlantic races to find these particles especially between CERN and Fermilab. The importance of these particles was so obvious that Nobel Prizes came in quick succession both to the theorists and the experimentalists. However the existence of the Higgs is also essential for the successful formulation of the electroweak theory, and signatures of the Higgs are thought to be produced whenever W and Z bosons are created. It again becomes obvious why finding the Higgs is so important; its existence would validate all those successes and Nobel Prizes, whereas a failure to find it would entail a stunningly hard look at some of particle physics's most fundamental notions.
These days the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is all over the news. Yet the most exciting part of Sample's book describes not the LHC but the Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) at CERN which was the largest particle accelerator in the world at the time. Unlike protons, electrons and positrons are fundamental particles and crashing them together produces 'cleaner' results. There were some fascinating events associated with the LEP. The behemoth's circumference was 27 kilometers and it crisscrossed the Swiss-French border, so authorities had to seek permission to build the accelerator underneath some homes. It seems that French law is special just like their cheese and language; apparently if you build a house in France, it means that you own the entire ground beneath the house, all the way to the center of the earth. Suffice it to say that some negotiation with the homeowners was necessary to secure permission for underground construction. At one point the intensity of the beams inside the mammoth machine started to wax and wane. After many days of brainstorming a scientist had a hunch; it turns out that the the gravity of the moon and the sun sets up tides inside the crust of the earth. These tides put the calibration of the machine off by a millimeter, too small to be noticed by human beings, but thunderingly large for electron beams. In another case, the daily departure of a train from a nearby station sent surges of electricity into the ground and affected the beams. It seems like when you are building an accelerator you have to guard against the workings of the entire solar system.
The story of particle physics is also fraught with tragedies. One of the biggest described in the book was the construction of the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas. The SSC was supposed to be the answer to CERN and got enthusiastic backing from Reagan and Bush Sr. Unfortunately the budget spiraled out of hand, the infighting intensified, congressmen remained unconvinced and the collider never got built in spite of spending billions and affecting thousands of careers of scientists who had relocated. The fiasco just proved that public support for even projects like the LHC is never a sure thing, and scientists don't always excel at public relations.
Then of course there are all the doomsday scenarios and concerns which were raised about the LHC, from the formation of black holes to the world ending in myriad other ways. As Sample describes, these concerns go back to an accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory which would impact large gold ions together at furious velocities. The would-be Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek raised the theoretical yet vanishingly small probability of forming 'strangelets', entities akin to the fictitious substance 'Ice-9' in Kurt Vonnegut's novel 'Cat's Cradle'. These strangelets would coalesce together matter around themselves and form a superstable form of dead matter that would rapidly engulf the entire planet. The concern about strangelets pales in comparison however to the possibility of 'vacuum decay', in which our universe is thought to be in a perfectly happy but metastable state like a vase on a table. All it takes is a little nudge or a massive kick from a high-energy particle collision in our case to dislodge the vase or universe from its metastable state into a stable state of minimum energy. Gratifyingly, not only would this state mean the end of life as we know it but it would also mean the impossibility of life ever arising. Yes, all these scenarios seem straight out of the drug-induced, overactive imagination of a demented mind, but at least some of them are within the realm of theoretical possibility. Unfortunately when the result is the destruction of the planet, the words "improbable" and "vanishingly small" will never do much to assuage the public's fears. It just indicates that physicists will always have to grapple with public relations issues vastly more complex than the LHC.
Finally, we get a fascinating overview of the kinds...
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good Read, November 1, 2010
This review is from: Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science (Hardcover)
Great book on a timely topic that is hard to write for general public. If you are looking for a book to explain what all the fuss is over the "God Particle" this is the one to read. Dr. Sample does a great job of bringing together the history, theory, and experimental aspects of the mass mechanism for everyone to understand. Everyone reads about the LHC and finding the "Higgs Boson" but little is written about the history and how this came to be.
It is a quick read and flows well with antidotes about the people involved that are pulled out through extensive interviews and research. Certainly there will be an updated version of this once the results are confirmed from Fermi or LHC and Nobels are awarded - along with the associated controversies.
Strengths of the book include:
1) Well written and easy to read
2) Quick read
3) Handles tough topic for non-physicist
4) Sets up well for next edition
5) Well researched with great interviews of subjects (Weinberg for example)
While the book is very Peter Higgs' centric in chapters three and four that probably makes sense given the name of the boson and need for the story to focus on someone. The years that Higgs spend after the 1964 papers toiling with an extension and defending the findings were interesting while the other theorists moved on to other work in the USA and Belgium. Higgs was not actually the first to work on this since Guralnik and Hagen were working with Gilbert on the issue well before 1964. But overall the book is a great overview of the theory work that is not often shared.
I am looking forward to how the story ends outside of the book, the USA edition, and the certain versions from Dr. Sample that will follow.
Great book. Great effort.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Scalar Boson, October 27, 2010
This review is from: Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science (Hardcover)
Perhaps the scientists aren't yet convinced that the Higgs boson exists, but the publishing world has no doubts. Massive is yet another entry in an increasingly crowded shelf of general science offerings devoted to explaining to those of us who couldn't finish Calculus precisely why billions of dollars and hundreds (thousands?) of scientific careers are being devoted to a single machine. Pity the author who must devote over half of his book to explaining background; however, Dr. Sample's talents are admirably suited to the task. He has the reporter's instinct for a good story and the dry wit to spice up a tale that in the wrong hands could take one back to a tedious high school science lecture--anyone? anyone?
In a field populated by authors who are explicating their own discoveries, Dr. Sample brings the unique perspective of a real journalist. Avoiding an overly detailed recitation, Dr. Sample brings a refreshing brevity to the tale. He manages to find the examples of human frustration, pique and ambition that make any story worth reading. But, that aside, I felt the first glimmer of understanding of what Dr. Higgs actually figured out. Sure, I may be more dim than the average reviewer, but I have read several books on the recent developments in particle physics (general offerings all) and the opening chapters of this book were the best at explaining the nature of the question, i.e. where does mass come from. This is also the only offering, thus far, that lends an entire chapter to the media-fueled hype over the issue of the dangers presented by high-energy colliders, which provides a fine commentary on the state of modern science education and societal tolerance for pure research.
To be honest, even though Massive does a great job of explication--as to the science, I haven't really got a clue. One needs mathematics to fully understand the Standard Model and it is to be hoped that the publishing boom in general science will continue to inspire new generations of scientists to avoid law school. However, to harp on the science misses the point entirely. This was an entertaining and informative telling of an important story that will no doubt become front page news when somebody somewhere publishes the big news that they have found the Higgs particle.
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