Beyond the God Particle Read online

  Published 2013 by Prometheus Books

  Beyond the God Particle. Copyright © 2013 by Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Trademarks: In an effort to acknowledge trademarked names of products mentioned in this work, we have placed ® or ™ after the product name in the first instance of its use in each chapter. Subsequent mentions of the name within a given chapter appear without the symbol.

  Cover image © 2013 Media Bakery

  Cover design by Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Lederman, Leon M., author.

  Beyond the god particle / Leon M. Lederman, Christopher T. Hill.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61614-801-0 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-61614-802-7 (ebook)

  1. Higgs bosons. 2. Particles (Nuclear physics)—Philosophy. 3. Matter—Constitution. I. Hill, Christopher T., 1951- author. II. Title.

  QC793.5.B62L425 2013

  539.7´2—dc23

  2013022346

  Printed in the United States of America

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1. Introduction

  Chapter 2. A Brief History of the Big Questions

  Chapter 3. Who Ordered That?

  Chapter 4. All About Mass

  Chapter 5. Mass under the Microscope

  Chapter 6. The Weak Interactions and the Higgs Boson

  Chapter 7. Microscopes to Particle Accelerators

  Chapter 8. The World's Most Powerful Particle Accelerators

  Chapter 9. Rare Processes

  Chapter 10. Neutrinos

  Chapter 11. Project X

  Chapter 12. Beyond the Higgs Boson

  Appendix

  Notes

  Index

  We thank our dear late editor, Linda Greenspan Regan, for her tireless efforts in initiating this project, and her excellent editorial skills throughout our previous projects, Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe and Quantum Physics for Poets. We also thank Julia DeGraf, Jill Maxick, Brian McMahon, Steven L. Mitchell, and Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger, who have served as our editors through the oft-time hectic completion of this book. For useful comments and advice, we thank Ronald Ford, William McDaniel, Ellen Lederman, and especially Maureen McMurrough and her dachshunds.

  The authors also underscore the importance of the learning of science by young people. Here, the continuing efforts of Prometheus Books in the publication of science books are gratefully acknowledged, as are the huge contributions of schools throughout the country. We especially acknowledge the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, recognized as one of the most successful science high schools in the nation, and Fermilab, the greatest national laboratory in the Western Hemisphere and our favorite in the solar system.

  Out of the mid-wood's twilight

  Into the meadow's dawn,

  Ivory limbed and brown-eyed,

  Flashes my Faun!

  He skips through the copses singing,

  And his shadow dances along,

  And I know not which I should follow,

  Shadow or song!

  O Hunter, snare me his shadow!

  O Nightingale, catch me his strain!

  Else moonstruck with music and madness

  I track him in vain!

  —Oscar Wilde, “In the Forest”

  There is a serene valley stretching about Lac Léman, from the spectacular French Alps, with Mont Blanc looming in the distance to the east, and the ancient round-top Jura Mountains to the west. This is the countryside of France surrounding Geneva, Switzerland, one of the most beautiful regions in all of Europe. It is a historic place; a center of banking and watchmaking; the home of Voltaire, the grandmaster philosopher of the Enlightenment; the host to the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations; a mecca for Roman history buffs, foodies, skiers, and train watchers. Geneva is a French-speaking canton of Switzerland, on the border with France, not more than a few kilometers from downtown.

  Within the environs of Geneva we find, today, thousands of the world's best-trained and most highly educated physicists hard at work. In a metaphorical sense, they have become the enchanted dwarves, the “Nibelungen” of the ancient Norse pagan religion who lived in a mystical region called Nibelheim, where they mined and toiled in the bowels of the earth. They ultimately created, from the gold of the Rhine, a ring of enormous magical power for whoever possessed it. It is here in Geneva that the metaphorical Nibelungen, the modern-day particle physicists, have fabricated, deep in the bowels of the earth, a mighty ring of their own.

  The physicists are real and their ring is real. It is not made of gold but rather of tons of steel, copper, aluminum, nickel, and titanium, enclosed within enormous vats of super-cooled liquid helium, decorated with the most resplendent and powerful electronics to be found on Planet Earth. With the mighty ring near Geneva, some 300 feet underground, the scientists painstakingly toil hard into the early morning hours. The product of their labor is not gold but the creation of a new form of matter, far, far more valuable than gold and never before seen in this world. While the Nibelungen ultimately unleashed magical powers to the bearers of their ring, the physicists are revealing, for the first time, hitherto unseen, mysterious, and ultimate powers, the forces of nature, forces that have sculpted the entire universe in all things from galaxies to stars, humans to DNA, atoms to quarks.

  The ring near Geneva is nothing less than the most powerful particle accelerator on Planet Earth. It is called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. It belongs to CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research). CERN belongs to Europe and is the largest physics laboratory on Earth, conducting basic research into the inner structure and behavior of matter. Produced in the LHC are the most energetic collisions between subatomic particles ever achieved by humans in a laboratory. In its simplest terms, the LHC is the world's most powerful microscope, and it is now the foundry of the “Higgs boson,” whimsically known as the “God Particle.”

  The entire undertaking of constructing and operating the LHC and harvesting its new form of matter, with its far-reaching results for the science of physics and the human understanding of the laws of nature, will ultimately bestow enormous economic power and prestige to its bearers, the countries of Europe that heroically toiled to build and who now operate the powerful ring. And to an extent, the US will benefit for contributing some funding and collaborating in the effort.

  But the great LHC and its modern and grand scientific triumph for Europe exists in large measure because the US screwed up big time.

  IRONY IN THE 90S

  The US botched an even greater undertaking to build an even bigger ring, deep in the heart of Texas, in a picturesque small farm town called Waxahachie, about forty miles south of Dallas, some twenty years ago.

  The story of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) is a long and winding tale, fraught with eager anticipation;
then missteps and setbacks; abounding with technical, political, and fiscal difficulties; and in the end leaving dashed hopes and careers behind. It pains us to think about it all now. The SSC was a grand and noble undertaking, and it would have been the ultimate jewel in the crown of American—no, worldwide—scientific and industrial prowess, a reassertion of that great Yankee can-do know-how of yore. But alas, the SSC died a stillborn death in 1993.

  It is the height of irony that at the very same time the SSC perished, several major revolutions were occurring in other spheres that had a common genealogy, all deriving from and driven by basic, non-directed research in modern science. The community of scholars, known as the academic economists, who hang out at such places as MIT, The University of Chicago, Princeton, and other vaulted ivory towers, were finally comprehending, in detail, what it is that actually causes economies to grow and prosper.

  Astonishingly, over the 200 years since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the simple question “What makes economies grow?” had not been answered. Why had the seething misery of the 1820s Dickensian London given way to the hustling, bustling world center of prosperity in the Victorian London of the 1890s? Even the first modern Nobel Prize–winning economist, the great Paul Samuelson—with whose world-renowned textbook many of us slugged out Economics 101—had predicted that after World War II the Great Depression would return. But it didn't. Why not? The opposite happened, as we entered a time of growth and prosperity that lasted to the end of the twentieth century. Why?

  Using a modern mathematical theory developed in the 1950s by the Nobel economist Robert Solow, it became possible to calibrate the spectacular growth of the global post–World War II economy. It was found that the spectacular growth was not due to the usual economic activity of bank lending and gambling on commodities futures. There was something else most definitely driving the boom. Some sort of “exogenous input,” as Solow called it, was driving the creation of new businesses and new high-quality jobs aplenty. In fact, using Solow's sophisticated mathematical economic model, one could calculate that 80 percent of the postwar growth was coming from this mysterious exogenous input. But what exactly was the exogenous input?

  The answer came in the 1990s, just as the SSC was being terminated, largely by the efforts a young and somewhat maverick member of the priesthood of economists named Paul Romer. The answer is almost obvious, yet it took more than 200 years from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations to figure it out. The answer is (drumroll): economies grow because of investment in science! Basic science, applied science, all science. All scientific research pays a handsome dividend, and the more science the better. One should invest in all sciences at once, from green science to hard cutting-steel science, from biology to physics. One should invest in a diversified portfolio. If you want to have a great economy, with jobs and prosperity for all, then you must spend your money on basic science. In fact, there is virtually no limit to the return on your investment. And, there is virtually no other way to do it. If you must practice austerity, whatever you do, don't cut the science budgets. And if you really spend enough money on science, you won't need to have austerity!1

  The fact that science drives economic growth is almost obvious to most people (certainly obvious to physicists and their neighbors), yet it took the eggheads of economics more than 200 years to figure it out on their terms. This is a very good thing because it provides a firm foundation to the relationship of science to society and human activities, which in turn provides a basis for making public policy for the investment in science by governments and for incentives to collaborate. Whatever one may think of the actual “science of economics,” we believe that Solow's and Romer's (and others’) discovery—that economic growth is driven by science—is right and true. When we think of all the many times our colleagues have heroically boarded flights to Washington, DC, to go argue for more science spending with their congressmen, only to return exhausted and disillusioned, we wonder if perhaps they should have also visited the Federal Reserve, where they may have found more sympathetic ears.

  THE BIGGEST “EXOGENOUS INPUT” EVER

  It's not hard to see the “exogenous input” of science into our economy at work. In fact, and again in the ironic 1990s, perhaps the grandest example of all was playing out. In 1989, a young, obscure, and virtually unknown computer scientist at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a project proposal to the laboratory's Computing Division, at which he was employed. Berners-Lee proposed to develop a “distributed information system.” Now what, you may ask, is a “distributed information system”? Is it what you get when you throw your unbound PhD dissertation up in the air on a windy day? Even Berners-Lee's boss may have been similarly confused and might have written on the cover of the proposal, “Vague, but exciting,” as he gave the green light to the project. Little did he know that he would have just unleashed the greatest information revolution humanity has ever seen and which today garners many trillions of dollars worth of new gross domestic product per year for all the people on Planet Earth.

  Tim Berners-Lee conceived of the basic tools that could meet the demand for information sharing over computer networks, initially only between particle physicists, all over the world. He founded the World Wide Web, which has now expanded far beyond the geekish community of particle physicists. It has changed the way we all live, work, and even think. By Christmas of 1990, Berners-Lee and associates had defined the Web's basic concepts, those funny names like “URL,”“http,” and “html” (never have such cryptic acronyms been typed by so many in such little time and on such a grand scale). They had written the first “browser” and stuff called “server software.” The World Wide Web was soon up and running.2

  In 1991, an early Web system was running for the particle physics community for which it was originally developed. It rapidly began to spread through the academic world of the particle physicists to Fermilab, to the Stanford Linear Accelerator, to Brookhaven National Lab, to the University of Illinois, and beyond, as a wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released its Mosaic “browser,” the first modern window-style navigator for the Web that could display in-line pictures and that was easy to install and run on ordinary PCs and Macintosh® computers. A steady trickle of new “websites” soon became a torrential flood.

  The world's First International Conference on the World-Wide Web was held at CERN in May 1994 and was hailed as the “Woodstock of the Web.” And although Al Gore took some heat for claiming to have “invented the Internet,” he did sponsor the key legislation, passed in 1991, that made the ARPANET a high-speed data transmission network, open to the general public.3 This largely stimulated the usage of the Web and subsequent development of the browsers, as well as new software languages for the Internet, and catapulted the accessibility and ease of use of the Internet for everyone. Soon there would be Yahoo!®, Google®, Amazon®, and countless businesses and exploits and things to browse on the Web, and vast web-based commercial activity, from finding a mate to buying a house or ordering the best coffee and doughnuts. The Web is now blended into the entire worldwide telecommunications system. The economic valuation and impact of the World Wide Web is inestimable.

  The Internet and World Wide Web were direct consequences of basic research in the science of particle physics. Particle physics is a worldwide science involving large teams of many people collaborating on single projects, and it was in dire need of a worldwide information-sharing system. It provided the unique and essential paradigm for the development of the World Wide Web. If US particle physics received a mere 0.01 percent (a hundredth of a penny on the dollar) of the tax revenue per year on the cash flow it has generated by inventing the World Wide Web, the Superconducting Super Collider would have been built in Waxahachie, it would have discovered the Higgs boson ten years ago, and we'd now be well on to the next machines—electron colliders, very large proton collider
s, and a veritable star-ship of a particle accelerator called the Muon Collider (which we'll discuss later).

  THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP: THE US CONGRESS

  We call them our elected “leaders,” but it was ultimately Congress that could not seem to find the “leadership cojones” needed at the critical moment in the SSC debacle. In a typical fit of budget austerity, concealed by faint praise for the great scientific endeavor, Congress officially killed the SSC on October 31, 1993, following a key vote in the House of Representatives on October 19. Austerity had become the modern political tool, and American science slowly began to be strangled by it. The new economic theory, indeed the obvious fact of growth driven by scientific research, got, and still gets, no traction on the floor of the US House of Representatives.

  Upon perusing the 103rd Congressional Record from 1993 (HR8213-24), we find some of the ironic testimony and the prevailing ill winds of that time. We have provided a fictional caricature here to illustrate the gist of it all—any resemblance to real testimony or persons is merely shockingly accidental:

  Hon. Mr. X:

  “Mr. Speaker, I am afraid that I am stirred into reluctant opposition of any further funding for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The Superconducting Super Collider would indeed be the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator in the world, and it may indeed be the largest scientific facility and allow for the largest and most profound physics experiments ever done. It would even ensure America's lead in science and technology and innovation well into the next century and beyond. Indeed, it would stimulate our best and brightest youth to consider science as a career and to develop a sustainable future for all of us. This unique research tool could perhaps unlock some of nature's greatest mysteries and give us a better understanding of our entire universe. Who knows what new inventions and spin-off products it may lead to, and what brilliant young minds will be inspired and how it will vastly improve our lagging science education system? If we're ever going to have a Starship Enterprise in the future, we'll certainly need a Super Collider today. The project would also attract some of the best and brightest physicists and scientists from all the nations around the world to the United States, compensating for our pathetically meager funding for scientific education here at home, further leading to the development of new critical technologies, and securing America's leadership position in fundamental physics research for the next century. Why, it would even help promote peace on Earth!