“Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass” by Frank Close

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Rating: 5/5 Stars

A fascinating book about an elusive character, Peter Higgs, an elusive particle, the Higgs boson, and how the two would lead Higgs to getting an elusive prize, the Nobel. With access to Higgs and other scientists, the author is able to give a good idea of who Higgs is and his personality, as well as give the reader an idea of how the Higgs mechanism operates and its importance to particle physics.

The book starts with a biography of Higgs, who was inspired to take up physics upon learning that physicist Paul Dirac was an alumnus from his school. His initial desire to study quantum physics get accidentally derailed by his supervisor, leading him to take up molecular physics before eventually turning back to the field of quantum physics.

Then, theories about how superconductivity occurs would turn out to be the inspiration for Higgs to write his famous two papers that would propose a mechanism for how some particles get mass. Of course, he was not the first to get the idea, but his paper would contain an additional item that would propel him to ‘stardom’: a prediction about a particle that is associate with the mechanism.

By examining the chronology of events in that critical period, the author gives a look at the research happening at that time by Higgs and other scientists that would eventually lead to the particle being called the Higgs boson, despite the mechanism for giving mass to particles being proposed by other scientists before Higgs. As it turns out, mistakes in assigning priority in highly cited papers would give the impression that Higgs was the first to get the idea.

With advances in experimental particle physics (especially the machines used to accelerate and detect particles) and theoretical physics pointing the way, the hunt was on to find the Higgs particle that would complete what would now be known as the Standard Model of particle physics. The highlight would be the announcement at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the discovery of the Higgs particle, with Higgs and other scientists who came up with the idea, present to hear the news.

But that would not be the end of it. Higgs, a private person, would now be in the spotlight for getting a Nobel Prize. But on the day of the announcement itself, Higgs decides to ‘vanish’ to avoid the media scrambling to interview him. But there is no avoiding the media on the day of the prize presentation itself.

This is one of the more accessible books about particle physics and the people who study them to try to figure out how nature works. The appendix of the book includes Higgs’s two papers, where he shows the need for a Higgs mechanism to provide mass to some particles and the implications of the mechanism (the Higgs particle). Both papers are one page long each, but together, they would lead many people to come together to discover whether that is how the universe actually works.

Book read from 2022/09/21 to 2022/09/26