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 Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more