Skulls in the Stars

The physics community is in a near frenzy today with the expectation that, tomorrow at 9 am Geneva time, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider will announce the first significant evidence that they’ve discovered the “Higgs boson”, a fundamental particle that was predicted in the 1960s and has been sought in high-energy physics experiments ever since.

What is the Higgs?  Physicists studying the fundamental forces of nature have long been concerned with understanding why matter has mass, and why some fundamental particles are so much heavier than others.  In the 1960s, a number of researchers postulated the existence of a “field” that permeates all space and, loosely speaking, creates a “drag” on matter, some types of particles more than others.  This field is now referred to as the “Higgs field”, and it is expected to be directly manifested in the form of a particle — the Higgs boson — that can be detected by smashing protons together at sufficiently high energies.

High-energy physics isn’t my field, so for those who are interested in learning more, there is an excellent video explainer at PhD Comics and a good written explanation at Cosmic Variance.  Also, Sean is hoping to live-blog the announcement, so check out his updates! (Though the news should break at 3 am EST!)

The “Higgs boson” is named for its most famous discoverer, Peter Higgs, who published a paper in Physical Review Letters in 1964 laying out the theoretical foundations of the idea. However, I was reminded today by Oliver Willis via his Twitter feed that there were in fact six physicists who, in three groups, independently and more or less simultaneously made the same “Higgs hypothesis”.  In addition to Higgs, the duo of François Englert and Robert Brout and the trio of Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble also published papers in Physics Review Letters in 1964 on what is now know only as the “Higgs”.

There are two phenomena at play here worth noting that occur quite regularly in the process of scientific discovery.  The first of these is the discovery of a new phenomenon (or concept) by multiple researchers independently at around the same time.  No discovery is made in a vacuum, and as science builds on earlier results, it is almost inevitable that many will be following the same “line of attack” in solving a scientific problem.  A good example of this is Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, first published in 1905.  Though Einstein is rightly credited with properly describing the new relativistic view of the universe, many other researchers such as Poincaré and Lorentz were inching along the same path.

The other thing that happens quite often in scientific discovery is the sometimes unusual and somewhat off-kilter naming of things.  Though Higgs did hypothesize the boson providing mass, others did as well, as we have noted.  Scientific discovery proceeds in a rather organic (often seemingly random) manner, and the naming of things is no different.  Sometimes, things can get credited to the wrong person.  Other times, things are named for a researcher against their wishes!  Two personal examples I know of this are the Berry phase and the Wolf shift, effects whose discoverers (Sir Michael Berry and Emil Wolf, respectively) have actively resisted having named after them.

Fortunately, in the case of the Higgs, the six authors of the original Higgs papers were acknowledged for their work in 2010 when they received the J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics.

As it turns out, I actually know one of the other researchers who originally conceived of the Higgs!  Professor Carl Richard Hagen is a professor at the University of Rochester, where I got my PhD, and I had a number of interactions with him.  While we wait for the Higgs news, I thought I’d share my own silly little anecdote related to Hagen.  It has little to do with science, but a lot to do with life as a graduate student!

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