Beyond the God Particle Read Online Free PDF Page B

the third millennium, what is the new form of matter we would like to tell Professor Einstein about? That is the multi-billion-dollar question—the subject of this book: it's the Higgs boson, or the God Particle. And, as to what lies beyond—we simply don't know.
    So, we might tell Professor Einstein in the lunch line at Princeton about the Higgs boson, and it goes as follows:

In its simplest theoretical incarnation, the Higgs boson is a form of matter named after one of the physicists who first considered the possibility. It forms a field, something like a magnetic field that is composed of photons, that fills all of space. Particles of matter interact with this field and acquire their masses. Heavy particles, like the top quark, interact more strongly with the Higgs field than light ones, like the electron. This should more properly be called the Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble Mechanism after all of the authors who should share credit for it. 12 The idea of the Higgs boson, and the way in which it gives mass to other particles in nature derives from many sources in other fields of physics as well. The central idea, in fact, lies at the heart of superconductors and was first considered by people like Fritz London in the 1930s. 13 Following the initially somewhat general ideas of the Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble Mechanism, Steven Weinberg put it all together and showed precisely how such a particle would fit into the overall scheme of nature, which ties together the so-called “weak” interactions with the “electromagnetic” interactions to form what we now call the Standard Model. 14 The name “Higgs boson” stuck. The Higgs boson does the job of making all the particles have their masses, and it becomes an essential ingredient. Through the Standard Model, the Higgs boson properties become precise, though the Higgs boson mass itself is ab initio unknown. Given knowledge of the Higgs boson mass, the Standard Model tells us how to produce the Higgs boson and how it will show up in detectors through its telltale fingerprints (i.e., via its “decay modes” 15 ).
    That's the “sound byte” (more of a “sound paragraph”) we might tell Professor Einstein, but throughout the next few chapters it is our goal to explain in clear and simple terms what this means, yet in greater detail, to give you a feeling as to why we need the Higgs boson and to give some inkling as to what may lie beyond.
    WHAT'S IN A NAME?
    By 1993 the search was already well under way when the Higgs boson was poetically dubbed the “God Particle” by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman(one of the authors of this book, if you haven't noticed) and his co-author, Dick Teresi. 16 This is the title of Leon's entertaining and poignant autobiography, which can still be purchased on the World Wide Web at Amazon as a bargain paperback or downloaded for your Kindle.
    Leon Lederman, aside from having made several major discoveries in physics that gave him the Nobel Prize in 1988, is also known for his talent in telling jokes ( The Lederman Show could just as well have been hosted by this Lederman). The term “God Particle” was a tongue-in-cheek “handle” for the Higgs boson, and it caught on, soon appearing in popular journalism covering the forefront developments in the science of particle physics, from the New York Times , to Der Spiegel , from the Jerusalem Post to the Pakistan Chronicle .
    Indeed, the moniker “God Particle” has stirred people up. While it was only an exercise in literary license, many people think it somehow imbues a deep religious significance to a particular elementary particle. It doesn't. Some scientists are disgusted by it, thinking it compromises the dignity and virtuous rationalism of the scientific community, furthermore corrupting the purity of essence and vaulted alabaster image of the scientist hard at work.
    We have experienced the mixed consequences of the “God Particle” moniker in public