Beyond the God Particle

308 Pages·2013·3.13 MB·English

by  Leon M. Lederman

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
Inquiries should be addressed to
Prometheus Books
59 John Glenn Drive
Amherst, New York 14228–2119
VOICE: 716–691–0133
FAX: [phone]
WWW.PROMETHEUSBOOKS.COM
17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1
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