Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass

To many, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva is synonymous with Peter Higgs, the physicist after whom the particle accelerator’s primary target—the Higgs boson—is named. But what is the Higgs boson, and why is it so singular to have been dubbed in media headlines the God Particle? And not least, who is Higgs?

This breakthrough goes back to 1964 when the thirty-five-year-old physicist seeded a theory about the nature of matter and the fundamental forces of nature that had remarkable consequences. This theory assumes that even if space were to be emptied completely of matter and all known sources of energy, it would still be filled by a ghostlike field that cannot be shut down. Immersed in this essence forever, we have nonetheless been unaware of it. The concept of an elusive elixir is so revolutionary, and so removed from our normal senses, that it took half a century to prove it, leading to Higgs’ Nobel Prize in 2013.

I have known Peter Higgs for many years, as a colleague in the scientific community and as a friend. After publication in 2011 of my history of particle physics in the late twentieth century, The Infinity Puzzle, Higgs agreed to join me in conversations at several science and literary festivals to help explain the universe and promote public understanding of his work. Elusive draws on those and other discussions, supplemented by a series of lengthy weekly phone conversations held during the COVID-19 lockdown, by letters, and by interviews of other leading actors in the decades-long quest for the Higgs boson. Memories of events that happened in the distant past are easily conflated, and wherever possible I have cross-checked the recollections of Higgs and other interviewees with documentary records, failing which, with one another’s knowledge of the events. If anyone has archived information that would lead to corrections, please let me know.

Originally, I had envisaged a detailed biography of Higgs with some personal memories of reactions to his theory and the path to its experimental proof. All projects evolve, and this one did especially. The unforeseen arrival of the COVID pandemic prevented access not just to Higgs and his papers but also to libraries and other tools of the trade, which we have often taken for granted until they suddenly went out of reach. Thanks to the internet, much of the research I wanted to undertake remained possible, though not access to Higgs himself. Peter Higgs has managed to avoid much of the pace of modern life. In addition to having no television in his Edinburgh apartment, he does not use the internet and is not accessible by email—historically emails sent to him at Edinburgh University would be administered by departmental assistants. He has no public mobile phone contact. Other than personal visits, Higgs has been accessible only by me first leaving messages on a landline answerphone to agree on times for a conversation, or by sending letters through the post.

I am a trained physicist, not a psychologist or social scientist, but as well as describing how the effort to confirm Higgs’ theory appeared to scientists at large for half a century, I wanted to explore the human side of science, not least to reveal the emotional roller coaster that Higgs experienced as the saga consumed his later years to such an extent that he told me it had “ruined my life”.1 The result is not so much a biography of the man but of the boson named after him, from conception through gestation to birth, and its creator’s feelings during the half-century saga that culminated in its discovery in 2012.

As Thomas Edison famously said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration”. What drives an individual to invest that 99 percent without any guarantee that the inspiration will follow? Why was it to Higgs and not some other more star-spangled scientist that the discovery fell? Some, uncharitably, dismiss Higgs’ singular success as luck. Without doubt fortune was involved here, as it is in many discoveries, but being in the right place at the right time is not enough; having the preparation to be able to act on serendipity is also important. Higgs’ story is a scientific analogue of the wisdom expounded by golfer Gary Player. After he holed a remarkable putt to win a major tournament, someone remarked, “Gary—that was lucky!” Player supposedly replied: “And the more I practice, the luckier I become!”2 Higgs’ one visible triumph was the result of years of practice, in his case of intense scholarship as he deepened his understanding of a profound enigma in theoretical physics and persisted until perfection was achieved.

As a student, Higgs wrote a theoretical physics paper that excited molecular biologists, but apart from that, prediction of the Higgs boson was his one triumph. There was no previous work by him in particle physics that would have singled him out as midwife of a revolution. Having made the breakthrough, Higgs himself developed no further new pathways; it would be others who built on his creation and drove the quest associated with his name. A shy, modest person, Higgs was fated to be thrust into the limelight when from the late 1980s interest in the boson suddenly blossomed. As the world’s media responded to the needs of particle physicists for a totem to promote their construction of the LHC, his life became public property. There are some who revel in fame and public adulation; Higgs is not one of them. On the morning when the Nobel Prize was to be announced, he disappeared, to avoid the media circus.

How did Peter Higgs feel to have been proven correct after waiting so long? Did he ever doubt his theory, or worry that he was wrong as thousands of scientists and engineers devoted years, decades even, of their careers to the pursuit of the boson? And when the eponymous particle was found, how did he react: with relief, or with trepidation that his life would be irrevocably changed? What does the discovery reveal about the cosmos and our place in the universe? These are the questions that I discussed with him over several years, as he lived through the dramatic days that moved a theory from speculation to lore, revealing for all time some of the most profound implications about the nature of the universe. His answers inspired this book.

Frank Close
Oxford, March 2022