Skip to main content

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.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more