higgs bosun

In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce a short answer to the question ‘What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?’ With the team at CERN  hoping to make the breakthough this year, I came across one of the winning entries submitted by David Miller at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College, London, UK

The Higgs Mechanism

Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.

In three dimensions, and with the complications of relativity, this is the Higgs mechanism. In order to give particles mass, a background field is invented which becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion – the clustering of the field around the particle – generates the particle’s mass. The idea comes directly from the physics of solids. Instead of a field spread throughout all space a solid contains a lattice of positively charged crystal atoms. When an electron moves through the lattice the atoms are attracted to it, causing the electron’s effective mass to be as much as 40 times bigger than the mass of a free electron.

The postulated Higgs field in the vacuum is a sort of hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe. We need it because otherwise we cannot explain why the Z and W particles which carry the weak interactions are so heavy while the photon which carries electromagnetic forces is massless.

The Higgs Boson

Now consider a rumour passing through our room full of uniformly spread political workers. Those near the door hear of it first and cluster together to get the details, then they turn and move closer to their next neighbours who want to know about it too. A wave of clustering passes through the room. It may spread to all the corners or it may form a compact bunch which carries the news along a line of workers from the door to some dignitary at the other side of the room. Since the information is carried by clusters of people, and since it was clustering that gave extra mass to the ex-Prime Minister, then the rumour-carrying clusters also have mass.

The Higgs boson is predicted to be just such a clustering in the Higgs field. We will find it much easier to believe that the field exists, and that the mechanism for giving other particles is true, if we actually see the Higgs particle itself. Again, there are analogies in the physics of solids. A crystal lattice can carry waves of clustering without needing an electron to move and attract the atoms. These waves can behave as if they are particles. They are called phonons and they too are bosons.

There could be a Higgs mechanism, and a Higgs field throughout our Universe, without there being a Higgs boson. The next generation of colliders will sort this out.

They might even find her handbag too.

When Apple held its public ‘Celebrating Steve’ memorial, the eulogy was delivered by Jonathan Ive. Promoted to Senior Vice President of Industrial Design in 1997 by Jobs, Ive oversaw the product design of Apple’s incredibly successful return to power. Trained at Northumbria University and now 44, he has become one of the most celebrated industrial designers in the world.  What has always interested me about his work is the extraordinary level of research and detail he goes into long before the prototypes are built.  He once spent months working solely on the stand for Apple’s desktop iMac; searching for the sort of organic perfection to be found in sunflower stalks.  When Jobs asked him in the late 90s to create colourful, cheap cathode-ray-tube computers he spent hours in a sweet factory to draw inspiration for the first iMac shell colours.  Job’s awareness of design began early in his life as a student:

‘I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.” (from his speech to Stanford University students in 2005).

Design is in Apple’s very DNA.

Joe Joseph is a shepherd, who has just been granted grazing rights for his flock of Wiltshire Horn sheep on Glastonbury Tor.  On the eve of Winter Solstice we were sharing supper with Joe and our friends in his shepherd’s hut and the conversation got round the distinctive characteristics of the Somerset landscape and the spirit of place.  Joe mentioned he had just finished Madeleine Bunting’s book on search for her father through the a small plot of  the Yorkshire landscape he devoted much of his life to and  offered to lend it to me.

A post Christmas cold meant that I took time out and found it hard to put the book down once I had started.  Her extraordinary journey through the history, ecology and farming of the gritty Yorkshire landscape is woven with a heartfelt journey of coming to terms with her father’s genius as a sculptor and learning to love him just as he was.  It made me look afresh at the watery landscape of the Somerset Levels that I have been living on for the last thirty years.

The nature writer Garry Snyder once said, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stay home.

Pebbles at Cape Cornwall

It’s taken me several months to realise that my camera phone is almost as good a capture device as my Canon SLR (perhaps not if I want to publish poster sized images, but the detail is amazing for such a tiny f2.8 lens). And of course the best camera is the one you have on you when you want to take the picture. A recent short break in West Cornwall gave me the chance to use it and create a Christmas book for a textile artist I am fond of. This is also a plug for Bobbooks who offer a fantastic design and print service. In the wild landscape that nurtured the artistic talents of Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Bernard Leach you could almost feel their spirits along the shoreline.