The God Particle by Richard Cox Read Free Book Online Page A

Standard—”
    “Right, you told me that. If the Higgs field isn’t there, your Standard Model might be wrong. And this field might explain how the universe got started or whatever. But what
is
the Higgs field? What does it do now?”
    Now she’s exasperated. He can forget about that phone number. “The Higgs field is made up of particles—boson is the technical name for this kind of particle, so really you’d call them Higgs bosons. Just like water molecules make up a swimming pool, these bosons comprise the Higgs field.”
    “All right.”
    “All right. And other particles, those with mass like quarks and leptons—particles that compose matter—they exist within this Higgs field. Or you could say the Higgs field sort of permeates everything. It’s all around us, everywhere. And the degree to which particles of matter interact with this field determines their mass.”
    Kelly shakes her head. “But when I think of a swimming pool, I don’t imagine densities of water based on who’s in the pool.”
    “Try this analogy then. Imagine a Hollywood party. At this party, your mass is determined by your popularity. So some unknown guy walks into the room and heads for the bar. He’ll have no trouble getting there, because no one bothers talking to him on the way. He’s a photon, which is appropriate, since you find photons boring. He has no mass at all.”
    Kelly laughs. Mike pushes on.
    “Now imagine a B-movie actor entering the room. He was in one picture about a giant scorpion and maybe something else with deadly asteroids. He gets a little attention, has to stop once or twice on his way to the bar. He’s got a tiny bit of mass. He’s an electron.
    “Finally, Madonna walks into the room. Everyone wants to be next to her, talk to her, see what naughty tricks she can perform with a water bottle. Takes her half an hour to reach the bar. She’s the top quark—the particle with the biggest mass.
    “All those partygoers following her around, the few who talked to our B-movie actor, the entire room of them that ignored our unknown guy, they’re the Higgs field. The more of them you interact with, the more mass you have.”
    “That’s a good analogy. Did you come up with that?”
    “Can’t take credit for that one, no.”
    “But can I ask a really dumb question?”
    “There aren’t any dumb questions in physics,” he says automatically.
    “Right. So tell me why I care if a quark is heavier than an electron.”
    “Obviously, not everyone does. But some of us want to understand the underlying structure of the universe.”
    “The thing is, I still have to get up and go to work every day no matter how the universe is structured. People still kill each other. Little kids on bikes still get hit by cars. I don’t know. I guess I’m a little cynical.”
    “Probably comes with the territory, though,” Mike says. “Having to report on stories like that every day.”
    She shrugs. “It’s reality, Mike. As much as those quarks and stuff. Or more so, depending on how you look at it. How much did it cost to build the super collider again?”
    “About twelve billion dollars.”
    “To find this one particle, this Higgs thing.”
    “There are other projects. We have all kinds of unanswered questions. About the possibility of supersymmetry, the search for dark matter—”
    “But the Higgs, are you worried that you haven’t found it already?”
    Mike sighs. “There are a lot of variables. When we smash particles together, it’s the shrapnel from these collisions that we examine. And there are billions of collisions. We have to use software applications to analyze the results, and tuning these tools can be tricky. It could take years to find the damn thing.”
    “Sounds like you need a better set of eyes,” Kelly says.
    4
    He’s thirty-two years old, and he’s only been in love once, and just like any single man his eyes are always open. His radar is always on. But the shots he fires, they never seem to