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94 Building Big Data Applications

The resultdHiggs Boson discovery

The discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012 is an astonishing triumph of mathematics’
power to reveal the workings of the universe. It is a story that has been recapitulated in
physics numerous times and each new example thrills just the same. The possibility of
black holes emerged from the mathematical analyses of German physicist Karl
Schwarzchild; subsequent observations proved that black holes are real. Big Bang
cosmology emerged from the mathematical analyses of Alexander Friedmann and also
Georges Lemaı ˆtre; subsequent observations proved this insight correct as well. The
concept of antimatter first emerged from the mathematical analyses of quantum
physicist Paul Dirac; subsequent experiments showed that this idea, too, is right. These
examples give a feel for what the great mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner meant
when he spoke of the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing the
physical universe.” The Higgs field emerged from mathematical studies seeking
a mechanism to endow particles with mass, and once again the math has come through
with flying colors.
Nearly a half-century ago, Peter Higgs and a handful of other physicists were trying to
understand the origin of a basic physical feature: mass. You can think of mass as an
object’s heft or precisely as the resistance it offers to having its motion changed.
Accelerate a car to increase its speed, and the resistance you feel reflects its mass. At a
microscopic level, the car’s mass comes from its constituent molecules and atoms,
which are themselves built from fundamental particles, electrons, and quarks. But where
do the masses of these and other fundamental particles come from?
When physicists in the 1960s modeled the behavior of these particles using equations
rooted in quantum physics, they encountered a puzzle. If they imagined that the
particles were all massless, then each term in the equations clicked into a perfectly
symmetric pattern, like the tips of a perfect snowflake. And this symmetry was not just
mathematically elegant. It explained patterns evident in the experimental data. But here
is the puzzle, physicists knew that the particles did have mass, and when they modified
the equations to account for this fact, the mathematical harmony was spoiled. The
equations became complex and unwieldy and, worse still, inconsistent. What to do?
Here is the idea put forward by Higgs. Do not shove the particles’ masses down the
throat of the beautiful equations. Instead, keep the equations pristine and symmetric,
but consider them operating within a peculiar environment. Imagine that all of space is
uniformly filled with an invisible substance, now called the Higgs field that exerts a drag
force on particles when they accelerate through it. Push on a fundamental particle in an
effort to increase its speed and, according to Higgs, you would feel this drag force as
a resistance. Justifiably, you would interpret the resistance as the particle’s mass. For
a mental toehold, think of a ping pong ball submerged in water. When you push on the
ping pong ball, it will feel much more massive than it does outside of water. Its inter-
action with the watery environment has the effect of endowing it with mass. The same is
the case of explanation with particles submerged in the Higgs field.