Transcript

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Fraser Cain:               
Astronomy Cast Episode 716: The God Particle – Remembering Peter Higgs. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand, not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest.

Hey, Pamela. How you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
I am doing well. I am still trying to get my sleep back on schedule after having a bunch of our CosmoQuest community mods come out and hang out during the eclipse week and all the events around that. It was a tremendous event, and it was so good to see so many people face-to-face, including some I had never met in person. At one point, we had 14 humans and four spare dogs in the house during the leadup to the eclipse as everyone was prepping.

Fraser Cain:               
Wow. Well, your house can absorb that.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
It can.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Although, keeping the dogs separated as necessary was a fascinating game of gates.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. But we were off last week because we were enjoying the eclipse and victory for both of us.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes.

Fraser Cain:               
We both saw totality, clear skies. It was perfect. So, yay us.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
We did it. We did it. No need to ever travel again for an eclipse.

Fraser Cain:               
No way. I wanna see more. But it was amazing. And I think for everybody out there who’s listening to this, if you did get a chance to see it, congratulations. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, the cosmic geometry continues, and you will get more chances in the future and some travel ideas. So, keep trying out there. And, yeah. Yeah, I’m so glad that we got a chance to see it after 2017 –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– when we didn’t get a chance to see it.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
We tried. We tried.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
The universe mocked us.

Fraser Cain:               
Yes. Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and the discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle. All right, Pamela. Who is Peter Higgs?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
He was a British theoretical physicist who every single thing I found to read described him as shy, as filled with creativity and curiosity, and just not wanting to be a famous person, but willing to explain science to anyone and break down the concepts as much as was needed to help them understand.

He’s not someone I ever met, but after all the reading I did for this episode, I really am sad I never met him. There aren’t enough personable theoretical physicists who actually can break things down because, most of the time, they’re just working at such a high level that bringing it down to even the level of an observational astronomer isn’t something that happens.

Fraser Cain:               
But let’s talk about his, I don’t know, discovery. What’d you call it, his theory?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
His background.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, yeah. His background, but also leading up to his – man, what’s the right word? I guess, his theory of that there should be a particle that connects mass to the universe. Was he the person that figured this out?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, he was one of them. And so, basically, this is the story of everything working exactly the way it’s supposed to. He went to a private school when he was in high school, or a magnet school; I’m not quite what the right words are.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, I know. It’s like public school means not what you think it is, and private school doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Right. Right, not in England. No.

Fraser Cain:               
Right, right, right. So, did he go to the one where the regular people go to or the one where people pay for them to go to?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
He went to the one that Paul Dirac had gone to, and that’s the key point.

Fraser Cain:               
Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
He went to the same high school. I think that’s the closest explanation word, that Paul Dirac had graduated well before him. But he knew about Paul Diran because was an alumni, and he decided that he wanted to follow in Paul Dirac’s footsteps and become a physicist. He moved to the city of London so that he could go to a more exclusive, finishing off the rest of high school, before starting university. And so, this really starts by being this is someone who had a role model, and that role model inspired them to do great things with their life.

So, first of all, win; I like this story already. He then bounced around. Did his undergraduate. Hitchhiked for a while. Fell in love with the city of Edenborough while hitchhiking, which is just pleasing. It was the ’50s. It was safer back then. Got his PhD when he was 25. Did the same thing that still happens today. He bounced around. He was a lecturer here, a lecturer there.

And when he was 35, he submitted a paper to physics letters that outlined how mass – which at that point in time couldn’t be explained. Like, everything we knew about particle physics at that point in time said a lot of the key particles should not have any mass. But they have mass. And so, there was this very deeply confusing issue.

Fraser Cain:               
And at this point, there was the standard model of particle physics that had a lot of the bits and pieces already figured out.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. It wasn’t as complete.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right. We knew about the proton, the neutron, the electron –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– but also the quarks and the various particles, the subatomic particles –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– some of which had been confirmed in both particle accelerators and others which hadn’t. But everyone just assumed they had to be there.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Right.

Fraser Cain:               
It was just a matter of time before they were found.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And so, he was working on trying to understand how symmetries get broken, how you make space for mass to exist. And he put together a theory that brought together both the boson that would go on to hold his name and a scaler field that permeated all of space and time that particles couple with through that boson. And it’s through that coupling that objects end up having what we discern as having mass in our laboratories.

And the paper was soundly rejected. And I love this part of the story because he submits the work; the paper gets rejected from a journal that was published out of CERN. So, the laboratory that would eventually be the one that discovers the Higgs boson said, “No science for you. Do not believe.”

Fraser Cain:               
Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And he added one paragraph to the paper. Submitted it to a different journal, Physics Review, and it got published. Now, here is where he is such an awesome human.

So, his work was not the onl