Beyond the God Particle (5 page)

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 firsthand. Every few years we host an “Open House” at Fermilab, where people from the community can come to see the accelerators and detectors and talk to scientists about what we do. People drive in from many distant Midwestern states for this event. Shortly after the appearance of the “God Particle,” we had such an Open House and the turnout of fundamentally religious people had significantly increased—a wonderful thing, as our tent is big enough for all who wish to come—but we suspect many came who sought “God Particles” and were somewhat disappointed by what they learned about our true scientific view of nature and, especially, its view on the creation of the universe. Here's one account of an incident:

I was serving as a guide at the Open House at this time, and one woman I met asked me rather suspiciously if there was also a “Satan particle?” “No,” I said. She continued, “So, exactly how did the God Particle create the world? I don't see it anywhere in Genesis or anywhere in the Bible.”
     I explained to her about
mass
, an essential property of matter, and how we see it in the “Standard Model” of particles, and how it has to do with something called the Higgs boson, and how the “God Particle” is just a whimsical literary name for that. “Mass?” she said, “…as in the Catholic Mass?” “No, I replied, “mass is a measure of how much matter there is in something.” She glazed over, and I again told her this was only poetically dubbed “the God Particle” by our venerable colleague, Leon Lederman, in his book, a copy of which she was actually holding.
     She seemed reengaged, and asked, “Well, where did all of this come from?” So I went on to explain a little about “creation,” as scientists see it, the “big bang,” “matter-antimatter asymmetry,” the “nucleosynthesis” part of it by which ordinary matter is created in the big bang, etc., and that most of the primordial matter is hydrogen and helium, and it all was here within three minutes—that's before a considerable amount of processing that subsequently happened in stars to make the heavier elements, the stuff we're made of. But, I explained, the raw materials were established in the big bang, and many mysteries abound, like “where did the antimatter go?”
     She seemed engaged in this and she asked a number of intelligent questions, finally getting to: “But what about life on Earth?” I explained that people weren't around at all for about thirteen and half billion years, and that we ultimately descended from microbial life-forms that arose, well, from large molecules, and eventually evolving into worms, vertebrates, primates, and then, “us.”
     At this point the woman looked utterly horrified, turned, and hastily beat an exit from the building, returning to a large bus parked outside with the name of a church in Missouri on its side panel. I am sure she felt that while, perhaps, he has no particle of his own, she had surely just met Satan, or one of his many cacodemons, incarnate.

Leon Lederman, unflapped by all of the controversy, sits charmingly and serene as ever in his oversized leather desk chair with a smile on his face and a glowing sense of humor about all of it, the Einstein bobble-head doll on his desk bobbling in approval. The “God Particle” moniker has become a standard by-line in the latest newsworthy updates on the Higgs boson around the world, from Tibet to Timbuktu. “Timbuktu?” says Leon with a twinkle in his eye, “I have an uncle who sells bagels in Timbuktu…”

In any case, for the purposes of this book we'll assume that Leon had the iconic Norse god Wotan (Odin) in mind when he named the “God
Particle.” And, in fact, the Higgs boson is not the end, or the “ultimate,” or even the “Götterdämmerung” of nature and science, but rather it all goes way beyond the Higgs boson. A Higgs boson represents the entry into a new domain of nature, the beginning of a new set of puzzles, and the beginning of our quest to discover something completely and radically new. The story always seems to turn out to be much bigger and grander than we may think it is at any given time.

Indeed, a curious parallel to the Norse myth continues: After its fabrication, Wotan (Odin) donned the Nibelungen's ring and went forth in his earthly wanderings, eventually ceding the ring to Siegfried, who slew dragons and rescued the beautiful Brunhilde from her eternal sleep on the fiery top of a volcano. Ultimately, in Götterdämmerung at the end of the Ring Cycle, the gods perish through their own perfidy and tomfoolery with the golden ring, ceding the future world down to the humans.

The message is clear: we must progress beyond a belief in demi-gods, dwarves, trolls, and selfish and angry gods—beyond the fairy tales we are taught as little children. The world ultimately belongs to and is stewarded, for better or worse, by humans. Perhaps the present moniker “Beyond the God Particle” fits all of this. Humans are continually making progress in learning how the universe really works, beyond fairy tales and myths, and through such profoundly successful international collaborations as at Fermilab and CERN, learning how to work and live together across national boundaries and cultural frontiers. It's all about collaboration on the largest scales of human endeavor. It's ultimately all about the future of people.

And so, we'll now abandon the term “God Particle” and look in greater detail at the Higgs boson, at the science of the smallest things in nature and what we are actually trying to do, and in many ways are succeeding in doing now—what we will achieve with the LHC, and what we hope to do, and must do, in the future. We are also looking beyond the Higgs boson, both as a thing and as an idea. With the Higgs boson in hand, physicists now have a powerful new insight into how nature generates its fundamental patterns and its properties of the elementary particles, and a new, powerful way to understand the remaining mysterious puzzles of the physical world.

The most fundamental of questions we are asking today concern the smallest objects, objects that lie far beyond the atom, the quarks, the leptons (“matter”) and gauge bosons (“force carriers”), the Higgs boson, and whatever lies beyond these things. Here we are exploring a strange new world—a world of the smallest things. No one has ever been here before, to examine what is happening at the smallest distances that are now probed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is not entirely blind exploration, for we actually have an inkling of what we are trying to understand—but surprises may be around the next corner.

In short: we are attempting to answer the vexing question:
What is the origin of mass?
Mass is one of the most important defining quantities of matter. But where does it come from? What makes mass happen? Will we ever become skillful enough to calculate the mass of the electron or the muon or the top quark from a “first principle”? What shapes and controls and sculpts the elementary constituents of matter and their masses?

This is a bit like trying to answer the deep biological question “What and where is the genetic code of life?” The answer to that question came in the 1950s—it turned out to be encoded into a very long and durable molecule called DNA. And from that has come an entirely new set of capabilities, as DNA can be “read” and “reread” and, eventually, we think, “rewritten.” All structure and function and ultimately all diseases of living organisms are controlled by DNA and its associated processes. Understanding DNA and its evolution is the foundation of understanding all life on Earth. Our open physics questions today are much like the biological ones before the 1950s: “What causes the phenomenon of mass?” Put another way, “What is the DNA of matter itself?”

To get some insight into the process of the exploration of nature, let us
ask, what deep questions were our ancient ancestors asking over the past three millennia? Like newborn babies, our ancient ancestors awoke with rational minds and conscious awareness into a world with a “reality” of its own. It was difficult initially for them to shake off primitive prejudices, notions and fears, unwarranted or otherwise, about things that seemed to happen or were only imagined to happen. There was an internal reality to the human mind in the early dawn of intelligence, voices that spoke in the night, apparent demigods lurking behind every tree, making all things, good or bad, happen. This led to peculiar notions, for example, that one must dance in strangely ostentatious ways, while wearing bizarre make-up and costumes, in order to make good things happen, perhaps to make it rain. Indeed, most appeals for divine intervention are just a variation on a rain dance and are motivated by something like the mortal fear of crop failure. It was difficult to discard that and to create a distilled “objective reality.”

But gradually there emerged a coherent understanding and philosophy of objective reality. Questions could now be posed and answers sought without reference to mythical beings and magic, without the fear of offending the particular gods that brought the rains. One learned to do “experiments.” And one learned that the reproducibility of an experimental result was far more important than the mere opinions of the witch doctors and high priests. Does it really rain when we put on our costumes and dance about? No. But there are certain crops that can grow better in a dry climate than others, and certain clever ways to grow them. At some point the issue of understanding reality became “science.”

Eventually people asked the deeper questions: “What are all things made of?” “What are their properties?” “How do they interact with one another?” “What are the fundamental laws of nature that govern these objects?” These are practical questions, but they are also the biggest questions. They deal with profound issues: “What constitutes physical reality?” and “What is the nature of physical substance?” and “What is physical force, motion, space, and time?” The answers hold deep secrets, and perhaps the key to a better fire, a better sword, a cure for illness, perhaps a way to make the rains come or prevent them from leaving, or to make the best of what the conditions are, and how not to mess things up. By the end of the nineteenth century, here on Earth, the question: “What is the nature of matter?” was framed within the province of chemistry: All matter is
formed from the basic atoms that comprise the chemical Periodic Table of the Elements—where “periodic”’ refers to their chemical properties. The elements form chemical compounds and enter into chemical reactions according to specific empirical rules. The laws of physics are those of Galileo and Newton, embellished by Maxwell, Gibbs, Boltzmann, etc.

Many thinkers from antiquity had previously developed a rudimentary concept of “elements.” These would be the basic, irreducible components out of which things are made. Among the earliest ideas were the so-called “classic elements,” as described by Plato: “Air,” “Fire,” “Earth,” and “Water,” as well as mysterious “Quintessence.” The latter was considered to be an all-universe-filling “ether.” This view of the nature of matter reduced every question to the five classic elements and offered a (very) tiny hint of an underlying order, but it certainly didn't get into the details. It was more of a dismissive answer to questions about the inner nature of matter.

Other philosophers of antiquity, however, were actually quite modern from our perspective. The foremost of these was
Democritus of Athens
, one of most advanced thinkers in all of human history, considered by some to be the “father of modern science,” certainly the Galileo of his age. Democritus was born around 470 BCE, and died around 370 BCE, thus living to the ripe old age of about 100.
¹
He was often viewed as an eccentric fellow and largely ignored in his home town of Athens, and was supposedly detested by Plato, who denied ever meeting him (though this was unlikely since Plato allegedly wanted all of Democritus's books burned).