Elusive - Frank Close *****

The title of this book was probably selected because it's doubly apt. The Higgs boson and what the subtitle describes as 'the mystery of mass' were elusive for many years, but the term equally applies to the extremely low profile Peter Higgs himself. Frank Close is ideally placed to to give us a handle on both of these topics, though I not sure if he's aware of the degree to which there's a third reason for the book's title to work so well - I'll come back to that.

The first great thing about Elusive is discovering a little bit about Peter Higgs as a person. Close makes clear one of the reasons this is so difficult to do - Higgs has an Edwardian view of communication with the world. That a person of his age doesn't do social media or video calls is not entirely surprising, but for someone who has been a working scientist to not even use email is pretty much unheard of. Hampered by Covid, Close relates having to rely on answering machine messages to set up chats. 

It seems absolutely in character that Higgs' response to a likely announcement of his Nobel Prize was to go into hiding. Close gives us a picture of a person with strong political views, especially in his younger years when Higgs was involved in CND, but who is not a social character. Despite the difficulties this imposes (it's so much easier to write a biography of someone like Richard Feynman), Close fills in enough of Higgs' personal life and interactions with others through his career to give us a feel for him as a person. Perhaps reflecting this closed nature, the one thing the biographical part really lacks is photographs. We see snaps of the elderly Higgs a couple of times and that's it.

As for the story of Higgs' work and how it fitted into the bigger picture of the development of this theory, Close is meticulous. Some aspects of this are absolutely fascinating. We are shown, for example, Higgs' two main papers which are shorter even than Einstein's famously compact E=mc² paper (more strictly m=L/V²) at one and two pages respectively. This is achieved in part because Higgs leaves out a lot of the reasoning that fills in the gaps as already known. I was aware of the controversy that arose because six people all made contributions of some sort to the theory, where only Higgs' name got applied, but I didn't realise that Higgs was the only one to identify the significance of the boson and how evidence for it could be used to test the theory. 

The only problem with this aspect of the book is that while it gives us a very good representation of what real work in the field is like (and particularly what it was like at a time when finding out about other people's ideas depended on receiving preprints through the post, at a time when postal strikes were rife), there is sufficient detail that it can be quite easy to get a little bogged down with yet another name and subtle addition to the mathematics to take on.

There is, however, that third aspect of elusiveness - and that is getting your head around the theory itself. It is no coincidence that Close describes most of the people working on this issue as mathematicians rather than physicists. This was less a case of coming up with a model to describe a physical phenomenon, and more of stringing together a set of mathematical deductions that predicted something that didn't make sense, and the attempt to add extra maths to the picture to explain this situation. If anyone was going to be able to cut through this complexity and make it approachable it is Frank Close - his Neutrino book, for example, is a masterpiece of clarity. But making the mathematics behind the Higgs field accessible remains elusive.

There were one or two times that there felt like a hint of light penetrating this mathematical mystery. The much deployed Mexican hat model made more sense than it usually does, while the observation from superconductivity that the Meisner effect, where the magnetic field is expelled from a superconductor, was the equivalent to photons gaining mass worked well - but I think many readers will still find themselves re-reading sections over and again without ever getting their head around what is being described. To reiterate, this is because the lengthy argument is driven from the mathematics with very little that ties it to the physical world. The process produces a real world theory, but one where the steps to reach it rarely make contact with reality as non-mathematicians know it.

Despite this issue, Elusive is a five star book - it reaches parts other books on the Higgs have failed to reach and Frank Close does a brilliant job. Yet the mathematical core remains... elusive.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here