November 27, 2011
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For those who can't read what it says on the trophy (i.e. everyone): "Royal College of Science Union, Science Challenge 2011, Imperial College Physics Prize, Kelly Oakes". Basically, I won a thing.
Every year the Royal College of Science Union at Imperial College runs an essay competition called the Science Challenge. There are usually four questions to answer and a number of prizes for the essays that answer them best.
I’ve been shortlisted before, but this year I finally won something — the Physics prize. Check out the photo to the left for a glimpse of my shiny trophy…
The essay question I answered was “Why should the average person care whether we discover the Higgs boson?” I took it as an opportunity to go off on one about why particle physics is important…
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From afar it may seem entirely disconnected from the real world, but the Higgs boson is much more integral to life, the universe and, well, everything than you may think.
Have you ever contemplated why you weigh what you do? I am not alluding to the second doughnut you had the other morning, or the ill-advised chips on the way home from the pub, but rather the fundamental reason why the atoms that make up your body, and everything else in the world, have a certain mass. If you haven’t, you are not alone — until recently, scientists hadn’t thought much about it either.
Before the standard model of particle physics came along, the origin of mass was not even considered a problem; that an object had mass was simply assumed. But when scientists began probing objects at smaller and smaller scales, they discovered that it was not quite as simple as that: according to the standard model, fundamental particles should weigh nothing at all.
The standard model describes the behaviour and interactions of all of the most fundamental particles we have seen — and one other particularly elusive one that, physicists hope, we will see in the near future. The model was developed throughout the 20th century and finalised when the existence of quarks, the particles that make up protons and neutrons, was confirmed in the 1970s. At the time many of the particles predicted by the standard model were yet to be seen. Over the years since then, physicists have ticked these particles off, one by one, like items on a shopping list. Now they are left with just one remaining unfound particle — the Higgs boson.
Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, came up with the idea of the Higgs field and its associated particle — the Higgs boson — in 1964. The field he proposed extends throughout the universe, and interacts with matter particles in such a way as to give them mass. After an interaction the field leaves behind a telltale sign — the Higgs boson. Finding a Higgs boson would prove that the Higgs field exists.
Two experiments that are part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are searching for the Higgs boson. Thousands of people from all around the world — including physicists, engineers and even anthropologists — work at CERN. If a Higgs boson is discovered there, there will be more than a few celebratory glasses of champagne — and an inevitable Nobel prize for Peter Higgs.
Elegant though the mathematics is that describes the Higgs mechanism, there is a chance that it does not actually describe nature. In this case, we have to look to slightly less elegant sounding ‘Higgsless’ models to discover the origin of mass. Some Higgsless models use extra dimensions to fix problems that would remain without the Higgs, while others use different mathematical tools. In fact, some physicists are more excited about the prospect of not discovering the Higgs, as this would leave the door open for other solutions that go beyond the standard model, and solve more problems than just the origin of mass.
So there are a few people at least for whom the discovery — or not — of the Higgs would be a momentous occasion.
But what about the rest of us? Well, there are many practical reasons to care about the search for the Higgs — if not that actual discovery. From conception through to the first collisions and beyond, particle accelerators spark many technological advancements that can be applied to fields as wide ranging as medicine, sustainable energy development and security. These advances would never have been made if we were not searching for as yet undiscovered particles like the Higgs.
However, one suspects that spin-off technologies and their economic benefits are not what the physicists at the LHC have in mind while running experiments and trawling data for signs of the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs told the Guardian why he was drawn to theoretical physics in the first place: “It’s about understanding! Understanding the world!” His enthusiasm is not abnormal in the physics community, even if it can sometimes be dampened by long hours spent staring at a computer screen analysing data. As humans we have a natural curiosity about the world around us, and we should not suppress that curiosity simply because the practical benefits of following it are not clear at the outset. Without such a curiosity the modern world as we known it would not exist.
Many people, including Peter Higgs himself, subscribe to the view that science for the sake of understanding the world around us is inherently valuable. If however, you need a more concrete reason to care about the Higgs, allow me to borrow some words from Carl Sagan: everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives on the pale blue dot we know as Earth — and none of it would have ever existed without the Higgs boson.
About the Author: Kelly Oakes has just finished a physics degree and is now studying for a master's in science communication, both at Imperial College London. In her spare time she writes about science and drinks cocktails.
Follow on Twitter @kahoakes.
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Congratulations. Nice article!
Link to this[...] My husband is one of the experimental physicists participating in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC at CERN. He left this morning on a trip to Geneva to visit CERN and that may be why I clicked on Kelly Oakes blog at the Scientific American blog network: Why the Higgs Boson Matters. [...]
Link to this[...] Why the Higgs Boson Matters Posted on November 28, 2011 by krister [...]
Link to thisTranslation: the standard model describes a universe that doesn’t actually exist, and so instead of conceding some fundamental defect in the standard model, they assume it must be right and instead there is a missing piece of the puzzle. Much like dark matter and dark energy, the higgs boson is another epicycle.
Link to thisVery well written. However, in my opinion, you didn’t “win” this award, you earned it.
Link to thisI wrote a paper for an english class on physics and examined the word mass, talked a little bit about the higgs and why I don’t think we will find it. I to find some where to post it for an assignment this place seemes approipraite.
Reasonable doubt: e=mc squared
“….. the universe stands continually open to our gaze but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is write” -Galileo.(Pappas) Galileo saw the language of the universe as triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Geometry and Trigonometry were the mathematics of his time. As humanity continued to gaze at the universe Geometry and Trigonometry began to misinterpret what we were seeing. Then Isaac Newton shows up with the foundations of classical mechanics and the laws of motion force equals mass times acceleration, Calculus. Gazing longer into the world around use brings Einstein and the flexibility of time itself, and energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Over the last few years once again the language (calculus) is failing to interpret what we are seeing. I will examine the foundation of the language, by examining the concept of mass. It was a geometric shape to Galileo, to Newton it was controlled by a strange force he call gravity. To Einstein it was interchangeable with energy with a relationship based on the maximum speed a mass less particle could travel through space-time. Is it time for a new language? A new idea? I am not going to try and solve the riddle of the universe just present a case of reasonable doubt based on my interpretation of the language and what seems to me to be an incomprehensible gaze into our universe.
Matter – Something that occupies space and can be perceived by one or more senses; a physical body, a physical substance. (Webster Dictionary) The word MASS first appeared in the English lexicon when Isaac Newton defined it as “the quantity of matter that arose from an objects, volume and density”(Massive 20). It was a theologian in the middle ages “Giles of Rome that is thought to take the important conceptual step disguising between an objects shape and amount of matter there was in it”(massive 19
). Shape, size, distance, geometry, and trigonometry were the languages Newton used to define a new language. He was first to realize that there was relationship between a MASSES acceleration, speed, and the distance it traveled. Based on the amount of energy that was needed to move a certain mass a certain distance /speed/ acceleration. This is my attempt at interpreting Newton’s three laws of motion in my own words. The language that Newton produced to describe his gaze into our universe was calculus.
This new language came with some new ideas that were necessary to define his gaze on the universe. Infinity – unbounded space, time or quantity. (Webster Dictionary) Unbounded- having no boundaries or limits. (Webster Dictionary) The idea of infinity is central to calculus and the derivative and the integral. (For the purpose of reading this paper you can think of these as like plus and minus opposite mathematical operations.) It’s easy for most people to conceptualize two apples plus two apples equals four apples. It’s easy for most people to conceptualize that an objects speed is equal to it’s acceleration times the time it has been moving. We can perceive these things around use every day. These things are taken as fact because they can be repeated over and over it is always that way to our perception. In order to define this gaze on the world around use using the language of calculus the idea of infinity is necessary. Now here comes thee Albert Einstein himself. His gaze brought some new ideas for sure, just no new language to go with it. He conceptualized that Newton’s Mass and Newton’s energy have a very distinct relationship to each other. The huge conceptual step in between is what we call chemistry today, I am not trying to right a novel so we go straight back to physics. Energy is equal to mass times the fastest speed a mass less particle can move through space. This one is little harder to conceptualize because not very many of use can see a single particle (quanta-packet or piece) of light moving past use, or the totality of the concept of energy, mass is not to bad put it on a scale, find out how much you got. Einstein’s ideas were proven right by our perception just like Newton’s were by what we are seeing mainly the bending of light around the sun and moon in a solar eclipse. That’s a really long story, put short. As people begun to feel a greater understanding of the big picture, interest moved to the small picture.
Here comes the Plank. Mr. Plank has got an issue with infinities; he thinks that there no way to some thing can be infinitely small he stares at his warm oven and thinks as heat transfers from one place to the next there has got to be a minimum rate of energy that can move at a time. To explain his gaze on the universe, there most of been a proportionality constant between energy and frequency of a quanta. This was proved as the Plank constant. A unit of energy can not be infinitely small or large. After Plank and his constant comes Mr. Heisenberg (does anyone watch that show Breaking Bad come on Randell I had to throw one random comment in here). Heisenberg’s gaze into are universe brought uncertainty. It states a fundamental limit on the accuracy of with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle can be measured. I am going to put it as thanks to Plank and his constant, we can never really know for sure. We can experiment and use statistics to analyze our universe but no one event can ever said to be pinned down to a certainty. With this language of statistics added to our languages of calculus, geometry, trigonometry, and the ambition to experiment comes what Physicists call the Standard Model of matter.
Now for this language that defines matter as we know it we use a statistical mechanism called renormalization. First developed to make sense of quantum electrodynamics (math language that describes how different quanta interact (photons and electrons), don’t get bogged down in understanding the words we are coming to the point. Renormalization is a way for mathematicians to deal with infinity’s in order to unify micro observations with macro observations (Paul Dirac will be mentioned here). Now with this language in place we can theorize on the next logical conclusion. Here comes Peter Higgs to save the day. Higgs sees a field much like the one that Maxwell and Dirac saw when he came up with his equations that go with the electrons and well as Yang-mills equations that describe radioactivity and the pieces of protons and neutrons. Higgs field is one that describes the mass of quanta. (So here we are finally back to mass. Now one thing to point out is that all of this is build on top of each other if you pull something out from the foundation and the rest of doesn’t make any sense.) You theorize on the next logical conclusion, and you find a Higgs field with a Higgs Boson that goes with it. Maxwell and Dirac have there electrons and the photon and there corresponding fields. Yang-mills got the quarks and the W and Z boson, and the gluon and there fields. Higgs got the Higgs Boson the piece that ties it all together the piece that fits our idea of mass observed in the macro world in with our idea of mass observed in the microscopic world. Like Dirac did for the photon. Let’s go find it. More importantly wonder if we don’t find it?
Well I am thinking that we are not going to find this Higgs boson and this is why. Evan if the Higg’s boson is the next logical step in connecting our idea of mass in the micro and the macro world together. There are still some observations in my opinion that can not be explained with in the Standard model of matter. One being the expansion of the universe and another being the way are group of stars we hang out with, interact with the rest of the universe. Einstein famously published a paper titled “Does the inertia of a body depended on its energy content”. To this point, no one can prove Einstein was wrong, and there is a lot of observation that says he is right. Just like Newton, Maxwell, Dirac and many more before them. We have come so far from when Galileo gazed at our universe. Moving forward painfully slowly to try and make sense out of what we observe. The last theoretical work to take use a leap forward was about seventy years ago now. I thought we were supposed to have flying cars by now. It begs the question. Wonder if we started down the wrong road one hundred some odd years ago when Newton started to define so many of the words of physics, like inertia, momentum, force, energy, and MASS? Wonder if we have been moving painfully slow in the wrong direction? I personally think we have been. If the Higgs Boson ends up being proven to not exist instead of exist, maybe we do live in the ether (that’s a long story for a whole other paper, look in to it, it’s interesting). I hope I have laid a foundation for the questioning your reality, and how you define language because here comes the part where questioning reality is necessary.
“Particles are described by a number of characteristics, but among the most common are mass and charge. Theories that predict particles masses are particularly helpful because physicists know how much energy will be required to make one in a particle accelerator, since greater mass corresponds to a higher energy.” (Pappas 602) Mass and energy being interchangeable is something that is taken as a truth that explains so many of our observations that it is hard to think of any other way to describe what we perceive. But we still can not connect these observations with others we have made. We have moved so far down this road that it is hard to look back. “Knowledge is power, and it is precisely our species capacity to reason- to deduce knowledge – that has secured us the title of “the most powerful creatures on Earth” (Alper 31) These ideas has brought great understanding and power to let the human race shape our reality, and has allowed for many of the modern conveniences we enjoy today. I believe we have begun to see the limitations of what our current understanding can bring. “I want to know God’s thoughts…… the rest are just details” (Albert Einstein). Stepping further down the road, may produce a theory of everything. Leaping use forward in a way that brings greater knowledge and understanding to our existence. Or maybe to know what God’s thoughts are we have to take another road. One where energy and mass is not what brings meaning to our existence.
Humans being the most powerful creatures on Earth may be trivial one day with out an answer to some of our toughest questions about mass. What we see as our knowledge, has brought use many things that may not mean anything one day. For everything that energy equaling mass time the speed of light squared has brought use it maybe knowledge that provides no meaning and nothing if we can’t find the next step. So maybe energy doesn’t equal mass times the speed of light squared. Maybe we are searching for meaning in the wrong place. Maybe mass is nothing more then a thought and we just want to naturally argue about the details. Maybe we are really close to an understanding that will allow for our reality to be reality, and I will live for ever and finally get that flying car I have been waiting for since the eighty’s. I think infinity has something to do with it, in calculus it is necessary to define the language. In statistics it is the only way to know something for sure. In physics it doesn’t exist. Wonder if we will know infinity one day?
Work Cited:
Pappas, Theoni. “The Joy of Mathematics: Discovering Mathematics All Around You.”
Wide World Publishing / Tetra, e-book edition 2010.
Richard Dawkins. “The Magic of Reality: How we know what is really true.”
FREE PRESS, A division of Simon & Schuster Inc. e-book edition 2011.
Kean, Sam. “The Disappearing Spoon.” Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group. First e-book Edition, July 2010.
Ian Sample. “Massive: The missing particle that sparked the greatest hunt in science” BASIC BOOKS, e-book Edition, 2010
Alper, Matthew. “The “GOD” part of the Brain”. Sourcebooks Inc. e-book edition 2008
Link to this[...] Why the Higgs Boson Matters is an award-winning post by Kelly Oakes, explaining (wow!) why the Higgs is important. [...]
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