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Waiting for the God Particle

this is an article published in the Times in January. Science: Waiting for the God particle Is physics really doomed if we don’t find the elusive Higgs boson Andy Martin My friend’s question was direct: “Have you found the Higgs boson yet?” We were standing in the shade of a jacaranda on the campus of Caltech in Pasadena. An attractive blonde particle physicist had returned from CERN in Geneva. Naturally, my friend Alan Weinstein (I like to think of him as W. Einstein) would ask her about the so-called God particle. She laughed with the kind of laugh that suggested that physicists had been guilty of hyping the sub-atomic realm. “Nothing yet,” she replied. “We’re hoping we’ll come up with something nobody has thought of yet. We want to be surprised.” Now that normal service has been resumed and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is back on-line, our chances of being surprised in 2010 are greatly enhanced. The Higgs is still high on the watchlist, but there are other exotic particles that could steal the spotlight. Top is the neutralino, scion of a brief encounter between a fermion and a boson, which could in one fell swoop shore up supersymmetry and throw light on the great mystery of dark matter. Over Christmas, Shahriar Afshar, formerly of Harvard, came out with a dramatic statement to the effect that physics is doomed if we fail to come up with the Higgs boson. He has a point. The Higgs was slotted into the “Standard Model” to explain the vital, but otherwise inexplicable, presence of mass. Consider this episode, taken at random from world history. When Geoff Hurst scores against Germany in the 1966 World Cup final, how does it come about that there can be a ball to kick, a foot, grass, and a planet to play on? One answer is mass. Without the Higgs all particles would be flying apart from one another at the speed of light and Wembley 1966 — along with the rest of the Universe as we know it — would cease to exist. But, even allowing that it is hard to prove a negative, would the non-appearance of Higgs cause the whole house of cards to tumble down? Physicists have long had a habit of looking forward to the point — invariably seen to be imminent — at which they can all retire, mission accomplished. The irony is that although cosmologists have thrown out the idea of the steady-state Universe and replaced it with a vision of perpetual expansion, they have held on to a harmonious steady-state conception of physics. In this way of thinking the end is always nigh. Physics lives in a constant state of crisis. The “chaos and infighting” predicted by Afshar if CERN doesn’t produce the goods is the norm. Its greatest exponents — from Galileo on — create contradictions by subverting conventional wisdom. Maybe we need an expanding, multidimensional theory of knowledge, too. Andy Martin is the author of Beware Invisible Cows (Simon & Schuster)