A Massive Discovery
GENEVA, July 4, 2022 – Today, humanity celebrates the 10th anniversary of one of the most impressive scientific achievements ever made, the discovery of the Higgs boson. And that is not an exaggeration. Understanding the mechanism behind this particle and its associated all-pervasive quantum field, brings us face to face with the core of our existence.
Without the Higgs field, matter could not form into the planets, stars and galaxies we have today. Massless particles, like photons, would be traveling about the universe, flying away from each other at the speed of light, rarely meeting up and never interacting when they do. The universe would be, well, a lot of nothing.
That us mere humans, clusters of massive particles, lost in the middle of a vast universe, were able to make such a discovery is a surprising accomplishment on its own. To get here, we derived theories and methods that can only be applied to a microscopic world completely alien to our own experiences: quantum mechanics and relativity. And, although these concepts require significant abstraction from our everyday life, they describe and predict particle interactions to an incredible precision. We stretched our imagination and our capabilities to their limits and we were right!
Along the way, to test these notions, we had to push technology to the extremes. We built enormous devices that could efficiently measure spatial dimensions on the order of microns, while operating at rates on the order of nanoseconds. We constructed computing to handle petabytes of data before the word even existed, and developed software and electronics to handle and sort the never-before-seen rates of data flow.
None of this would have been possible without the efforts of dedicated scientists from around the globe. The international collaborations constructing and operating the experiments each represent over 100 nationalities. These people were driven by insatiable curiosity to seek answers to the most basic and yet most complex questions of humanity. It is this common drive to understand the universe that binds these people and gives them the impetus to overcome nearly impossible challenges to find the answers.
Today is a day to celebrate humanity. Yes, there is a lot of anger, pain and stupidity propagating our planet these days. The invention of the World-Wide Web has come back to haunt us with lies and conspiracy theories, as well as angry rhetoric designed to hurt and divide. World leaders in politics, commerce and communication take advantage of human ignorance to accumulate power and wealth at the cost of lives and human dignity. Yet, for this one day, we can look back at a nearly impossible accomplishment and take pride. In this instance, signal rose above background and nature revealed the answer.
We scientists often lament the fact that our current model describes only 5% of our universe. Further, it misses a microscopic description of gravity and there is no elegant way to derive the properties of the particles and forces we know. Yet, when one considers we are but one species on one planet orbiting one of 100 billion stars in a galaxy that is only one of a 100 billion in our universe, 5% is not so bad.
And we continue to make progress at an impressive rate. Since completing the Large Hadron Collider, the two experiments that discovered the Higgs boson, ATLAS and CMS, have each published more than 1000 papers. Many do not appreciate the gruelling effort that goes in to writing these papers, but keep in mind that each one has passed through the hands of 3000 authors and has survived the scrutiny of months and months of painstaking review and edits. Yet, each publication brings us closer to understanding our universe and each one of them provides our children and their children with the tools they will need to thrive on this planet and beyond. Science is what happens between the discoveries.
On the day of the discovery seminar in 2012, I had the pleasure of serving as the Outreach Coordinator of the ATLAS Experiment. I spent a lot of time that week matching collaboration members with journalists, making plots understandable, and editing summaries describing the accomplishment. I also had the opportunity to partake in quite a few interviews, myself.
One of the most memorable was recorded for a world renown U.S. TV news show called 60 Minutes, a few years after the discovery. Lesley Stahl, a brilliant journalist who had done outstanding work for the show for decades, asked an important and pointed question to a group of us, “What has this discovery brought to all of us, how has this changed our lives?”
There is, of course, no correct answer that question. For us scientists, the value of the discovery was obvious. It provided us with an important tool to carry on our work, like a traffic sign pointing us in the right direction to continue our journey toward understanding the missing 95% if our universe. However, such an answer is rarely satisfying for Ms. Stahl, the public who pay for the research, or the policy makers who support it.
One can try to alleviate the need for short-term gratification with descriptions of the technological advancements, the training of students, the development of spin-off applications. And these points are all true. The economic enhancements directly stemming from the research are impressive and have been shown time and again to yield large payback to the participants.
But the truth is, we are driven by the science. The pursuit of knowledge, the establishment of a better understanding of our world, satisfies an innate human trait that is essential for our survival. We do this work for the people who will be able to answer Lesley Stahl’s question: our great grandchildren. While I would love to be able to predict the implications, to draw up a model of a Higgs transporter or to describe Higgs treatment, that remains for future generations to discover and develop. And I guarantee they will.
So, let’s celebrate today and get back to work tomorrow.