Higgs-Boson/Higgs/GOD Particle

The particle physics world is a-buzz since CERN announced about experimental verification of the Higgs-Boson, i.e., the 'particle' that gives mass to matter. A few articles have mentioned the Scotsman, Prof Higgs, who shares his name with the Higgs-Boson. However, some columnists and scientists are deliberately now calling the particle the Higgs rather than the Higgs-Boson. I'm a tad confused whether the Higgs is  a subset of Boson particles or whether Higgs-Boson particle has been update to just Higgs or if there have been experimental verification of other Boson particles. Whatever the case may be, due credit should go to Satyendranath Bose for creating the fabric that the Higgs theory is based on.

Following is a write up on the Higgs-Boson by Charles Santipillai & V Sivakumar, Published on "The island", 9th July 2012, Upali newspaers, Sri Lanka.

GOD Particle

On Fourth of July, while Americans all over the world celebrated their independence from Great Britain, the world in general and the scientific community at the CERN laboratory in Geneva in particular, celebrated what is believed today to be perhaps the greatest scientific discovery of the 21st century, namely the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson subatomic particle or the so called "God particle". The term "God particle" itself is a corruption of the more colourful and appropriate "Goddamn particle" given by the Nobel prize winning Physicist and former Director of Fermilab, Professor Leon Lederman, as it proved so elusive to find.  

It took the scientists 48 years to finally detect it. The possibility of existence of the Higgs boson was first entertained in 1964 by Prof. Peter Higgs. His "ah ha" moment came when he was just 34 years old, while he was a lecturer at the Edinburgh University in Scotland. He speculated that the existence of such a subatomic particle could explain why matter, from atoms to planets have mass rather than float around the universe without mass like photons of light. Some of his colleagues were skeptical. One journal rejected his paper. Even Prof. Stephen Hawking, the one time Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, doubted if such a particle would be found. On 4th July, Hawking lost his bet of $100. The latest subatomic particle is named after two outstanding Physicists, Prof. Peter Higgs from the UK and the late Satyendra Nath Bose from India. There are already calls for Prof. Peter Higgs to be given the Nobel Prize for Physics and a Knighthood but Bose was never honoured by the Nobel Academy.

Satyendra Nath Bose was an intellectual Bengali who was a contemporary of Einstein. As a student at the Hindu High School in Calcutta, he was awarded 110 marks out of 100 since he was able to solve a problem by more than one method! He was Professor of Physics at both Universities of Dhaka and Calcutta. Just as the Indian Mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanuan sent his paper to G.H. Hardy in Cambridge, Satyendra Bose sent a paper to Albert Einstein in 1924 describing a statistical model that led to the subsequent discovery of the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) phenomenon. This became the basis for describing two fundamental subatomic particles, namely "Boson" after Satyendra Bose and "Fermion" after Enrico Fermi. BEC is the fifth state of matter after solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Gas temperatures are cooled to very near the absolute zero when microscopic properties of quantum mechanics will govern the bahaviour of a macroscopic system. The credit for observing the first elementary particle however goes to the British Physicist and Nobel Laureate J.J. Thomson in 1897.

According to Hindu mythology, the universe creates and destroys itself in an endless cycle. Today, a theory of the early universe widely accepted by astronomers known as the "Big Bang" has become "The Standard Model" that describes all the particles, forces and interactions that make up our universe. The alternative theory is the so called "Steady-State Model" of Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle according to which the universe had always been just about the same as it is now. Fred Hoyle found the concept of the Big Bang distasteful, comparing it to the jumping of a ‘party girl’ out of a cake. When the discoverer of quantum mehanics, Dr Paul Dirac once sat for Michael Noakes, the portrait painter of the British Royal family, he casually mentioned that Creation was one vast Bang and dismissed the Steady-State as nonsense, Noakes responded by asking: "But if nothing existed beforehand what was there to bang?"

So, about 14 billion years ago, instead of the Word, there was the Bang! As the Nobel Prize winning Physicist Steven Weinberg points out, it was "an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning, with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle". The matter that came rushing out following the big bang was made up of a variety of elementary particles, the building blocks of our universe, of which the Higgs boson is the latest and most expensive. 2,400 people including some of the world’s greatest scientific brains worked as a group 70m below ground in Geneva at the CERN laboratory using the 27km long, 6 billion dollar baby known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that straddles the Franco-Swiss border, to find the elusive particle at last. They were able to smash protons in the LHC at almost the speed of light and search the debris for traces of particles that sprang into existence perhaps for a tiny fraction of a second before disintegrating. They are 99.999% sure that they have got the Real McCoy. Although it may appear to a layman as if it is a case of "mountain labored and brought forth a mouse", the scientific community ranks the discovery of the Higgs boson on par with Newton’s Theory of Gravity and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.  It may even rival the discovery of the structure of the DNA by James Watson & Francis Crick in 1953.

The Higgs boson was the missing piece in the jig-saw puzzle of the standard model of Particle Physics. With this in place the theoretical model can predict the forces that control our universe. It is vital to our understanding of how the universe is built. In our universe, some particles have rest mass while others such as photons of light do not. Higgs field is supposed to fill all space, and as the particles move through the field and interact with it, they acquire mass and bind together into the familiar matter that we observe. It is this subatomic particle that gives all matter its mass. Higgs boson is perhaps the heaviest of all subatomic particles having a mass of 126 billion electron volts. The mass is a measure of how much stuff the particle contains.The Higgs bosons permeate the universe creating an invisible energy field. If not for the Higgs field, the subatomic particles would be shooting and zipping through the universe at the speed of light and so would never have fused to form our stars, planets, plants, animals and ourselves. Without it, as the Texan saying goes, our universe would be "all hat and no cattle".  The discovery of the Higgs boson is proof that science is progressing in the right direction.

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