Peter Higgs and his boson have both been “Elusive”

Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskFrank Close’s new book tells Mr Higgs’s side of that story. He had spent a year preparing to disappear, it turns out. First, he threw journalists off the scent—they thought he had planned a jaunt to the Scottish Highlands that day. On the morning itself Mr Higgs discreetly left his flat in Edinburgh, took a five-kilometre bus ride to Leith and vanished for a few hours.

The Higgs boson is the cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics, the quantum mechanical description of all known elementary particles. In the theory’s earliest years in the 1950s and 1960s, one of its many open questions was: where did the mass of the various particles come from? If subatomic particles did not have any mass, they would zoom around the universe at the speed of light for eternity, never slowing down enough to coalesce into atoms, people, planets or stars.

Mr Close is among today’s best writers on the history of quantum mechanics and its associated field theories, and his book is more a biography of the boson than of the man. He rattles through Mr Higgs’s life story in the first few chapters. He was a sickly child and missed the first year of school. Thanks to a library at home, he went on to teach himself basic trigonometry, algebra and calculus.

Mr Higgs was not the only scientist to predict the mass-giving force field in 1964 but, crucially, he was the only one to add, at the last minute and as an afterthought, a short paragraph at the end of one of his papers on how evidence for the invisible force field might be found. If it existed, he wrote, there should be a particle associated with it, a massive boson.

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