Denis Balibouse/Reuters
Collision Course: It was the longest, most costly manhunt in science for an elusive particle that was said to be key to the workings of the universe. For a generation of physicists, it was an appointment with history.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: October 7, 2013
It’s that time of year again, when physicists of a certain age, even if they do not want to admit it, are afraid to step into their morning shower for fear of missing the call from Stockholm.
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Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Peter Higgs on July 4, 2012, when the heads of two large research groups, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, had independently confirmed the existence of the particle bearing his name.
This year the pressure is magnified if you are Peter Higgs, 84, a legendarily shy and self-effacing professor at the University of Edinburgh whose name is attached to what is so far the landmark discovery in physics this century: a particle said to be the key to explaining the existence of mass, diversity and — yes — life in the universe, the Higgs boson. Most people know it as the “God particle.”
Dr. Higgs — the J. D. Salinger of physics — has already let it be known that he will not be available in any form on Tuesday. But if you believe the oddsmakers, the news media and the self-appointed prognosticators, Dr. Higgs is a lock to join the immortals on Tuesday around 5:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, when this year’s Nobel Prizein Physics will be announced.
But he will not be the only one pausing by the shower. At least four other living theorists can claim credit for coming up with the idea of the boson — quantum-speak for a force-particle — and its mother ship, the Higgs field, in three papers published back in 1964. Not to mention the 10,000 or so scientists who built the Large Hadron Colliderat CERN, the nuclear research organization, and then sifted through two trillion subatomic collisions to find the long-sought particle. According to tradition, a maximum of three living people can share the award.
It is rare that there is an obvious candidate for the physics prize. Many people think it would be crazy for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences not to recognize the rock star event of the decade, but nothing is ever for certain.
On July 4, 2012, physicists working at CERN in Switzerland announced that they had discovered a particle matching the description of the Higgs boson. The news sparked headlines and set Champagne fountains around the world flowing. It also started a widespread debate about who would win the Nobel Prize, if the work panned out, which it has.
Betting pools like Ladbrokes in London and other prognosticators have named Dr. Higgs the leading candidate. As he once told The Guardian newspaper, speaking of the boson that bears his name: “It has consequences. If it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be here.” (Indeed, a Scientific American blog put up a joke article saying the prize had been awarded to the subatomic particle itself.)
Besides Dr. Higgs, the other theorists with good claims to the particle are François Englert and his colleague Robert Brout of the Université Libre de Bruxelles; the team of Tom Kibble of Imperial College London; Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester; and Gerald Guralnik of Brown University. Dr. Brout died in 2011, so he is not eligible for the prize.
Other theorists who get mentioned sometimes in the Higgs conversation are Jeffrey Goldstone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose work in the early 1960s drove much of the theoretical work of Dr. Higgs and the others, and Philip W. Anderson of Princeton, already a Nobel laureate, whose work on superconductivity in 1963 helped point the way for Dr. Higgs.
As for the experimentalists, here is where the Nobel tradition of the one genius meets the reality of collaborative modern science, and the oddsmakers throw up their hands. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, which has been given to groups, the physics prize so far has always gone to people. One solution would be to give the prize to the leaders of the two collaborations, CMS and Atlas, that found the boson. As of the July announcement, they were Joseph Incandela of CMS and Fabiola Gianotti of Atlas — but the leadership revolves, so winning would be a fluke of timing.
Another would be to give it to the leaders of CERN: the director general, Rolf Dieter-Heuer, who muscled the two giant collaborations to the finish line; Lyn Evans, who oversaw the building of the Large Hadron Collider from its beginnings; and Steve Myers, who wrote the first paper proposing what would become the Large Hadron Collider back in 1984 and has kept the machine running. But that would leave out the unsung heroes and graduate students who did the work.
An informal survey of physics insiders this summer found widespread doubt that the Royal Academy would be able to find a way to “narrow the circle,” as one physicist put it. Most seem to agree that if any prize is given for the theory, Dr. Higgs should be part of it. Often Dr. Englert is also mentioned. He and Dr. Brout beat Dr. Higgs to the punch back in 1964, limning the notion of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass, but they did not explicitly point out that there was a new particle associated with that force field, the one we now call the Higgs, although they have argued that it was implicit in the math.
Drs. Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble were the last to weigh in, and although they did mention the new boson, they have fought to be included in the glory. Reached last week, Dr. Hagen said his expectations were low. If there is a third theorist from 1964, it might likely be Dr. Kibble, who has a long and distinguished career.
In 2004, Drs. Higgs, Brout and Englert won the Wolf Prize, considered to be a forerunner of the Nobel. In 2010, Drs. Higgs, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble shared the Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society, another important forerunner, and the first time that prize had been split six ways.
This year, the European Physical Society gave its high energy and particle physics prize to the Atlas and CMS collaborations, naming the founders of those experiments, Michel Della Negra, Peter Jenni and Tejinder Virdee.
In an e-mail, Dr. Jenni wrote, “I honestly hope that the Nobel will this year go to those who motivated us to start the LHC adventure.” He named Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert specifically, adding, “These gentlemen are already old, no point to wait longer!”
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