That qualifier typifies a phenomenon I call Higgs hedging. Experts can make any number of claims for the Higgs as long as its existence remains in question. They disagree on whether it is an indivisible entity or a composite of more familiar particles. They argue about whether there is just one kind of Higgs or five. Harvard University physicist Sheldon Glashow has called the Higgs boson a commode down which all theoretical inconsistencies are flushed.
THE THEORIST
Between 1961 and 1964, British physicist
Peter Higgs showed that a
hypothetical field could explain why
matter has mass. His
idea gained wide acceptance, even
though the particle associated with
this field remains undetected
Courtesy of Peter Tuffy, Edinburgh University
The final say will come from experimentalists like the ones at Fermilab. The accelerator teams work amid a surreal farrago of abstract architecture and ecological awareness. A spidery sculpture called Broken Symmetry straddles the main entrance, power pylons shaped like the Greek letter pi march to the east, and a thousand acres of the surrounding campus is restored tallgrass prairie. Underground, two enormous detectors, each weighing 5,000 tons, monitor subatomic particle smashups, looking for anything extraordinary.
Standing by one detector, called DZero, Gerald Blazey, project spokesman and a physicist at Northern Illinois University, described the complicated shower of secondary particles emitted from every collision. A diagram of these so-called decay channels looks like a flowchart of ancient runes. “If the Higgs exists, we’re already making it,” Blazey noted. But the equipment at the Tevatron is not sensitive enough given the current data to distinguish the fallout of a Higgs shower from those of other heavy particles such as the top quark, which was found here in 1995.
“You probably have to produce about a billion Higgs particles to reliably identify one,” MIT theorist Frank Wilczek warned me. Even the Large Hadron Collider will struggle with this problem, he said. “It’s like listening to AM radio. There’s so much interference.”
After a morning of talking to particle physicists, my mind was also beginning to sound like AM radio. Before lunch I went to the restroom to wash up. In the stall I heard a heavy ping on the tile floor. I knew at once what had happened. My talisman had fallen off its cord.
My talisman was a round slug of pewter inscribed with esoteric symbols not unlike the physics notations on the diagram at DZero. I had bought it years before when I was in the thick of heartache from the death of a friend. The shopkeeper explained that the talisman was meant for protection from destructive urges and energies and that I should wear it on a cord next to my skin until it or the cord broke. The talisman would not fall off, she explained, until I was safe from harm. I tied it around my waist all those years ago, and never removed it.
THE SEARCHERS
Scientists and technicians in Fermilab’s control
room monitor invisible particle interactions,
looking for the anomaly that announces
new physics. Courtesy of Fermilab Visual Media Services
