Jin Lei Alex from The Temple of Consort
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The day he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize, he was not excited, not excited.
Instead, he chose to flee the city where he lived quickly and move to the sparsely populated countryside.
Then he said, "Then no one can disturb me." ”
It was the British physicist Peter Higgs who did it.
Many people still have the impression of him as "he won Hawking at his bet", "the boson that he waited for 48 years was finally confirmed", and "won the Nobel Prize at the speed of light".
It even subverts the cognition of the entire physical world.
But what is less well known is that Higgs was also an extreme social terrorist.
Ten years ago, on July 4, CERN announced the official discovery of the "God particle" (the Higgs boson).
And this also allowed Higgs to "force" himself to stand in the spotlight of everyone.com.
When confronted with a flood of reporters and a barrage of questions, Higgs was particularly shy and cramped:
Reporter: Do you feel that the theory proposed is like a science fiction novel?
Higgs: If you want to think it is, just keep thinking about it.
Reporter: What is the significance of this discovery? Can it drive the world?
Higgs: I don't know.
What's even more dramatic is that when Higgs returned to Edinburgh, the reporter asked him to show his head from the curtain at the press conference, and then this scene appeared...
The original intention of the reporter was to express that "Higgs (boson) is emerging", but from now on, it is also very much in line with the character of Higgs's social fear.
The "God Particle" made Higgs famous, but he himself felt terrible.
In an interview with particle physicist Francis Edwin Close, a 40-year-old friend and friend of the 40-year-old, he said:
The discovery of bosons ruined my life.
Higgs believed that his style of work was independent, the kind that occasionally had a good idea.
In Close's view, Higgs was as elusive as the particles he had discovered.
So he titled his new book on Higgs and his theories: Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass.
……
Perhaps, social fear, elusiveness, and solitude are the most real Higgs in the spotlight.
The paper was rejected and switched to a rival magazine: they didn't understand
Higgs was born on 29 May 1925 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
At the age of 17, he entered the London Municipal Secondary School, where he studied mathematics; He later earned a degree in physics at King's College London and became a Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.
(He then worked at other universities before returning to the University of Edinburgh in 1960 as a lecturer.) ）
During his time at the University of Edinburgh, Higgs developed a keen interest in "quality".
After in-depth research, Higgs made this point:
At the time of the Big Bang, particles had no mass. But after less than a second, they got the quality. This is the result of their interaction in a kind of field.
This "field" was later known as the Higgs Field, which went on to predict the existence of the Higgs boson.
But even studies that now seem to have such "epoch-making" significance have experienced the tragedy of "rejection".
In 1964, Higgs wrote two papers, each of only 2 pages, based on his previous research, and sent them to physics Letters.
However, the journal only accepted one, and the second paper was rejected by the famous physicist Yoichiro Minami at the review stage on the grounds that "the physical significance of this theory needs to be explained".
Later, after Adding This Section, Higgs switched hands on rejected papers to Rivals magazine, Physical Review Letters.
As a result, I won!
This became the first public publication of Higgs's vision of the boson.
At that time, the rejection of the manuscript, Higgs can be said to be grumpy, and in many speeches after that, he said:
Well, I think they didn't understand it at all.
In fact, the "unreadable" thing has been going on for quite some time.
So much so that the British Minister of Science could not hold a contest to find a way to explain the theory in the most popular "human language".
But even so, the Higgs boson still did not attract much attention.
Social fear Higgs: The "God Particle" ruined my life
In 1993, Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman took the shot.
He wrote a book to explain the theory, and the name was all thought out, called "The Particles of God's Curse."
But the magazine editor changed the name to "The God's Particle" to make the book even more gimmicky.
Sure enough, with the name in the book, the concept of the "God particle" was quickly spread.
But that bothered Higgs himself—because Higgs was an atheist.
And he is humble and low-key, and he has not accepted naming related theories and particles by his own name.
In Higgs's own words: "I don't deserve it."
He has repeatedly said that the mechanism should be called the "ABEGHH'tH mechanism" because he believes that eight researchers have contributed to the theory.
But the "God Particle" made it even more unacceptable, so he had to face the matter of naming his own name.
But later, when someone mentioned the "Higgs boson" in front of him, he still couldn't help but shiver.
And the troubles that the "God Particle" brought to Higgs were not limited to naming this one.
In 2012, CERN held a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland, to announce the discovery of new particles consistent with the properties of the Higgs boson.
As soon as the news came out, it was like a bombshell dropped on the scientific community.
Higgs, who has always been low-key and introverted, just sat in the corner at the press conference and took out a white handkerchief to gently wipe the tears that came out of his eyes:
This confirms my conjecture 48 years ago, and I didn't expect to see it all in my lifetime.
Afterwards, Hawking, who had bet with Higgs, openly sent him a $100 bet, followed by the Nobel Prize.
But it is also these influx of glory that suddenly pulls higgs, who is originally reclusive, into the spotlight, bringing him a lot of trouble.
So, the things that happened earlier happened.
On the day he learned he had won the Nobel Prize, Higgs hurriedly left his home in downtown Edinburgh and moved to a country estate.
That way no one will bother me.
After all, before the official discovery of the Higgs boson, the 83-year-old (2012) was still living alone in Edinburgh.
There is no TV or computer at home, and he rarely even calls; His main way of communicating with the outside world was simply by flipping through a few physics magazines.
Even in the impression of others, he is the kind of person who sees strangers who are shy.
It's not hard to see why the "God Particle" bothered Higgs.
So much so that the old man left that sentence in an interview:
The discovery of particles ruined my life.
Higgs in life: Getting used to solitude
In life, Higgs was used to being a lone traveler.
He spent most of his childhood under the tutelage of his mother at home; His father was a BBC radio engineer and lived largely apart from them.
And the theme of the first half of his life can basically be summarized as: the pursuit of unseasonable things.
He was even labeled "old stubborn" when he was only in his 20s.
Because he chose a branch of physics that was almost abandoned by his contemporaries, everyone else thought there was no future.
As for how to deal with girls, the young Higgs almost "knows nothing."
A lifelong friend he met at King's College London, The British physicist Michael Fisher later recalled:
Whenever they were driving around Europe on vacation, he would introduce Higgs to his girlfriend, but unfortunately Higgs never succeeded...
△ Michael Fisher
At that time, the image of Higgs insulated from romance was deeply rooted in people's hearts.
So much so that when he later proposed to the idealistic Chinese-speaker Jody Williamson, he stunned everyone.
When Michael Fisher got his ideal job at King's College, Higgs went to the University of Edinburgh.
At a meeting at the University of Edinburgh Staff Club, Higgs met Jody Williamson.
They married between 1962 and 1963.
One day in 1965, Higgs, who was working, was called to the phone: His wife had given birth to their first child.
Coincidentally, the paper Higgs was writing that day was a pivotal moment in the birth of the universe.
In terms of scientific research, since Higgs wrote his first paper on the Higgs boson in 1964, he has been splashed with cold water many times.
But he eventually received an invitation to speak at Harvard, and this time, the other physicists in the audience finally stopped hitting his point.
When he returned to Edinburgh in 1966, he already had an international reputation.
On the other hand, his marriage and family began to have problems.
His wife gave birth to their second son in 1969 and filed for divorce a few years later.
The divorce, far from making Higgs work harder, left him without the spiritual pillar that underpinned his research.
Later, Higgs decided to abandon the pursuit of honor and devote himself more to teaching.
His ex-wife, Jody, stayed in Edinburgh. The two remained friends and shared the duties of their parents and, later, their grandparents.
While the discovery of the "God particle" caused inconvenience to Higgs's life, at the same time, it was enough to prove how important the Discovery of the Higgs boson was.
Why is the Higgs boson so important?
Let's talk about the Higgs boson.
In 2013, the nobel prize official award to Higgs for the following reasons:
He first theoretically discovered the mechanism of the Higgs boson, and recent experiments have confirmed the existence of such particles.
So why is the Higgs boson so important, and why can scientists win the Nobel Prize in Physics with it?
To answer this question, let's first look at how the quantum world and particles interact.
When Higgs first proposed the Higgs boson in 1964, physicists worked to describe weak forces in a theoretical framework called Quantum Field Theory (QFT).
By then, quantum field theory had formed the basis of quantum electromagnetism and was a very successful description of electromagnetic interactions.
However, due to a fundamental problem, it is impossible to apply quantum field theory to weak interactions: the theory does not allow particles to have mass.
Specifically, the weak-force carriers of the W and Z bosons must be massless, otherwise a fundamental symmetry of quantum field theory will be broken, causing the theory to fail.
This creates a bug – because the weak-force carrier must have mass to be consistent with the very short range of weak interactions.
The Higgs mechanism found a solution to this problem.
The Higgs mechanism, which can be described simply as:
When the universe was born, the Higgs field was filled with particles that were unstable but in a symmetrical state.
Less than a second after the Big Bang, a stable configuration appeared in the field, but it broke the initial symmetry.
In this configuration, the theoretical equations are still symmetrical, but the broken symmetry of the Higgs field yields the masses of the W and Z bosons.
In addition, later studies have found that other elementary particles can also obtain mass by interacting with the Higgs field.
The Higgs boson, a kind of elementary particle of the Higgs field, is not charged, is extremely unstable, and decays immediately after formation.
The particle has been shown to be of great significance in unraveling the mystery of the origin of matter mass.
Since 2013, when Higgs himself won the Nobel Prize for the Higgs boson, research in the field has been booming.
On the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, Nature magazine shares what scientists have learned and want to continue exploring since then.
The Cern son's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is about to enter its third operational phase; In addition, scientists have begun preparations, planning to conduct the fourth run of the LHC starting in 2030 to explore more unsolved mysteries.
Here, let's join Nature in wishing higgs bosons a happy 10th birthday!
Finally, share a quote from the Times about the Higgs boson:
It is fitting that such particles are named after Higgs. It is elusive and small, but it has the power to change the world.
Resources:
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01859-w
[2]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-higgs-boson-ruined-peter-higgss-life/
[3]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-years-after-the-higgs-physicists-are-optimistic-for-more-discoveries/
[4]https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/100
[5]https://www.npr.org/2022/07/05/1109742531/cern-large-hadron-collider
[6]https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/he-who-chose-his-particle-over-his-wife-the-burden-higgs-had-to-bear-to-explain-the-weight-of-the-universe/cid/400030
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