Skip to main content

Frank Close - Four Way Interview

Frank Close is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Fellow Emeritus in Physics at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the author of The Infinity Puzzle and most recently Trinity. He was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his 'outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics' in 1996, an OBE for 'services to research and the public understanding of science' in 2000, and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science in 2013. His latest book is Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass.                 

Why this book? 

Back in 2012, around the time of the Higgs boson discovery, I realised I was in a unique position to write about Peter Higgs and his boson. I had interviewed him on stage before the discovery, been with him when he got the call to go to CERN at the time of discovery, and then interviewed him again several times afterwards. I was a spectator as he lived through a seminal piece of scientific history, in which he had been a central player. As he spoke freely about his feelings – about the boson, how public and media reaction had overwhelmed him, and his views about the role of the discovery for the future of science – the idea of recording this dramatic story, from Higgs’s perspective, began to grow. 

Initially I planned to write Higgs’s biography. Gradually it became clear that the real story would be that of the boson. The arrival of the pandemic and associated lockdowns made access to him impossible other than by phone, and a full biography became impossible. The title 'Elusive' has many connotations in this saga! 

The interviews with Higgs left me with two huge surprises. One was that he described the whole affair as having 'ruined my life'. Why he felt this is explained in Elusive. The other was a matter of physics, which seems not to have been widely noticed. This was that he had not realised that his seminal 1966 paper provided the means for experiment to identify the boson that carries his name! It was only after the discovery, in 2012, that Higgs learned that the experiments had used an equation in that paper from 46 years ago. I found it remarkable that Higgs was in effect disowning any credit for pointing the way to the boson. Readers can assess this for themselves – it’s on pages 102-103. 

How does this work change the future of physics?

Not at all, though it might change readers’ perceptions of the 50 years history that led to discovery of the Higgs boson. It also previews where particle physics is now headed.  

What’s next? 

For my own entertainment I have been writing short essays about 'Seven Lucky Numbers'. These are integers, irrational fractions, e, 𝛑, 0, infinity and i (square root of -1), all working towards understanding the most beautiful and mysterious equation in maths: Euler’s ei𝛑+1=0. I have also begun to research the early decades of nuclear physics with a view to writing a book titled Destroyers of Worlds – Oppenheimer’s famous quote when the atomic bomb was first tested.   

What’s exciting me at the moment?  

The LHC is now working again at higher energy and intensity than before. I hope we will be able to produce two Higgs bosons at a time and learn how they interact with one another. This will be the first step towards understanding how the bosons condense to make the Higgs field in which we are all immersed, like fishes in water. Currently we know what the Higgs field does, and how much energy it takes to excite Higgs bosons into life, but we have little insight into how the field is formed, whether it has deeper structure, and why the various particles have their specific masses and properties. When we know all this, will it be possible to alter the structure of the Higgs field? And if so, what might that enable? A science fiction story perhaps?

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...
Post a Comment
Read more