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Particle headache: Why the Higgs could spell disaster
If the particle discovered at CERN this July is all we think it is, there are good reasons to want it to be something else
SO PETER HIGGS didn't get this year's Nobel for physics after all. It would have been the Hollywood ending to a story that began half a century ago with a few squiggles in his notebook, and climaxed on 4 July this year with a tear in his eye as physicists armed with a $6 billion particle collider announced they had found the particle that bears his name. Or something very like it anyway.
Higgs wasn't the only one feeling a little emotional. This was the big one, after all. The Higgs boson completes the grand edifice that is the "standard model" of matter and its fundamental interactions. Job done.
If only things were that simple. As particle physicists gather in Kyoto, Japan, next week for their first big conference since July's announcement, they are still asking whether that particle truly is the pièce de résistance of the standard model. And meanwhile, even more subversive thoughts are doing the rounds: if it is, do we even want it?
Higgs's squiggles aimed to solve a rather abstruse problem. Back in the early 1960s, physicists were flushed with their ability to describe electromagnetic fields and forces through the exchange of massless photons. They desperately wanted a similar quantum theory for the weak nuclear force, but rapidly hit a problem: the calculations demanded that the particles that transmit this force, now known as the W and Z bosons, should be massless too. In reality, they weigh in at around 80 and 90 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), almost 100 times meatier than a proton.
The solution hit upon by Higgs and others was a new field that filled space, giving the vacuum a positive energy that in turn could imbue particles with different amounts of mass, according to how much they interacted with it. The quantum particle of this field was the Higgs boson.
As the standard model