The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Dramatis Personae

  1. THE INVISIBLE SOCCER BALL

  2. THE FIRST PARTICLE PHYSICIST

  Interlude A

  3. LOOKING FOR THE ATOM: THE MECHANICS

  4. STILL LOOKING FOR THE ATOM: CHEMISTS AND ELECTRICIANS

  5. THE NAKED ATOM

  Interlude B

  6. ACCELERATORS: THEY SMASH ATOMS, DON'T THEY?

  Interlude C

  7. A-TOM!

  8. THE GOD PARTICLE AT LAST

  9. INNER SPACE, OUTER SPACE, AND THE TIME BEFORE TIME

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on History and Sources

  Index

  FOR EVAN AND JAYNA

  First Mariner Books edition 2006

  Copyright © 1993 by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi Preface copyright © 2006 by Leon Lederman

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lederman, Leon M.

  The god particle : if the universe is the answer, what is the question? / Leon Lederman ; with Dick Teresi.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  Originally published: 1993.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-71168-0

  ISBN-10: 0-618-71168-6

  1. Higgs bosons. 2. Particles (Nuclear physics)—Philosophy. 3. Matter—Constitution. 4. Science—Philosophy. I. Teresi, Dick. II. Title.

  QC793.5.B62L43 2006

  539.7'21—dc22 2006009243

  Printed in the United States of America

  Drawings by Mary Reilly

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6

  The lines from "Relativity," by D. H. Lawrence, are from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence © 1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C. M. Weekley, executors of the estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

  The quote from Jay Leno was released with the permission of the "Tonight" show and NBC Productions

  I like relativity and quantum theories

  because I don't understand them

  and they make me feel as if space shifted

  about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still

  and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing

  always changing its mind.

  — D. H. Lawrence

  Preface

  A FUNNY THING happened to me on the way to Waxahachie...

  It is awkward writing a preface to a new edition of a 1993 book that was originally based on a false premise. It wasn't the major premise, but a premise nonetheless. And the title of the book, The God Particle, problematic to begin with, was based on this misguided assumption.

  I had assumed back then that the world of science was on the brink of a series of exciting new discoveries that would bring us closer to understanding how the universe works and the identities of the building blocks that make it possible. We were so close to a major epiphany in 1993 as we looked forward to a brand-new instrument, the Superconducting Super Collider (or SSC), then under construction in Waxahachie, Texas. It was to be the most powerful particle accelerator, or "atom smasher," ever built, designed to answer our most serious questions. But the unexpected intervened.

  Before I get into that, however, let me review the main thrust of the book, a thrust that was valid then and remains valid today. The God Particle is a history of particle physics that began in about 600 B.C. with the philosopher Thales in the Greek colony of Miletus, as Thales asked himself whether all the varied objects in the universe could be traced back to a single, basic substance, and a simple, overarching principle. The approach of Thales and his followers is still with us today—a belief in ultimate simplicity, still with us in spite of the apparent complexity of our universe revealed in the research of the past 2600 years. Our story paused at Democritus (450 B.C.), who coined the term atomos ("too small to see and that which cannot be cut") and proceeded through the centuries and into modern times to explore the accomplishments of Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Sheldon Glashow, T. D. Lee, Steven Weinberg, C. N. Yang, and many other heroes of particle physics. Although I name only theorists, it was my fellow experimentalists who really did all the heavy lifting.

  In 1993 we were justified, I think, in being optimistic about our chances to forge what my colleague Steven Weinberg calls "a final theory." Late in the nineteenth century only one atomos elementary particle, the electron, had been experimentally discovered. The ensuing decades saw us corral the rest: five more leptons (cousins of the electron), the six quarks, and the essential bosons, the photon, the W and Z, and the gluons, all force-carrying particles. One important particle had eluded us, though: the Higgs boson, a particle that would finally illuminate many of the mysteries of matter. The SSC's primary mission was to find the Higgs.

  We were sanguine about the future. The SSC's construction was 20 percent complete. Our pleas for this machine began under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, construction started in 1990, and we thought we were home free until Congress canceled the project in 1993. Einstein said a physicist's job was to "read the mind of God." But how do you read the mind of a U.S. congressman? Albert, you had it so easy! Junking the SSC would free up $11 billion that would fund a cornucopia of other physics experiments, plug up the deficit, eradicate the national debt, banish poverty, cure acne, and bring us peace in our time. (How did that work out, by the way?) But I digress.

  Here's the good news. The God Particle was ahead of its time. There is now a brand-new machine about to come online. It's called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Its first beams are expected in 2007 and 2008, and it is advertised to find the Higgs, to discover supersymmetry (so read the book!), and to explore several new outrageous, if not totally crazy, ideas that have emerged since that black day in 1993. So I was smarter than I thought, just writing in the wrong decade. This new instrument will not be surrounded by the friendly folks of Waxahachie, but will be located in Geneva, Switzerland, which has fewer good rib restaurants but more fondue, and is easier to spell and pronounce. One of the ideas to be explored by the LHC that turns normally phlegmatic theoretical physicists incoherent with excitement is the idea of "extra dimensions." Hidden dimensions adding to our up-down, left-right, and to-and-fro dimensions (or x-y-z) would reveal a new kind of universe in which we live and play. This is not only important to help underpin exciting "theories of everything," but, as the experimenter Henry Frisch says, "It will help us find all those missing socks."

  Now, as for the title, The God Particle, my coauthor, Dick Teresi, has agreed to accept the blame (I paid him off). I mentioned the phrase as a joke once in a speech, and he remembered it and used it as the working title of the book. "Don't worry," he said, "no publisher ever uses the working title on the final book." The rest is history. The title ended up offending two groups: 1) those who believe in God, and 2) those who do not. We were warmly received by those in the middle.

  But we are stuck with it. Some of the physics community has picked up the phrase, and both the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor have referred to the Higgs boson as "The God Parti
cle." This may advance our hopes for a movie version. After all, this time we are certainly on the verge of finding the Higgs and exposing a simpler and more elegant universe hitherto hidden from our sight. It's all in the book.

  Have I ever lied to you?

  —Leon Lederman, 2006

  Dramatis Personae

  Atomos or a-tom: Theoretical particle invented by Democritus. The a-tom, invisible and indivisible, is the smallest unit of matter. Not to be confused with the so-called chemical atom, which is merely the smallest unit of each of the elements (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so on).

  Electron: The first a-tom discovered, in 1898. Like all modern a-toms, the electron is believed to have the curious property of "zero radius." It is a member of the lepton family of a-toms.

  Quark: One of the a-toms. There are six quarks—five discovered, one still sought after (in 1993). Each of the six quarks comes in three colors. Only two of the six, the up and the down quark, exist naturally in today's universe.

  Neutrino: Another a-tom in the lepton family. There are three different kinds. Neutrinos are not used to build matter, but they are essential to certain reactions. They win the minimalist contest: zero charge, zero radius, and very possibly zero mass.

  Muon and tau: These leptons are cousins of the electron, only much heavier.

  Photon, graviton, the W+, W−, and Z0 family, and gluons: These are particles, but not matter particles like quarks and leptons. They transmit the electromagnetic, gravitational, weak, and strong forces, respectively. Only the graviton has not yet been detected.

  The void: Nothingness. Also invented by Democritus. A place that a-toms can move around in. Today's theorists have littered the void with a potpourri of virtual particles and other debris. Modern terms: the vacuum and, from time to time, the aether (see below).

  The aether: Invented by Isaac Newton, reinvented by James Clerk Maxwell. This is the stuff that fills up the empty space of the universe. Discredited and discarded by Einstein, the aether is now making a Nixonian comeback. It's really the vacuum, but burdened by theoretical, ghostly particles.

  Accelerator: A device for increasing the energy of particles. Since E = mc2, an accelerator makes these particles heavier.

  Experimenter: A physicist who does experiments.

  Theorist: A physicist who doesn't do experiments.

  And introducing...

  The God Particle

  (also known as the Higgs particle, a.k.a. the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the Higgs scalar boson)

  1. THE INVISIBLE SOCCER BALL

  Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

  —Democritus of Abdera

  IN THE VERY BEGINNING there was a void—a curious form of vacuum—a nothingness containing no space, no time, no matter, no light, no sound. Yet the laws of nature were in place, and this curious vacuum held potential. Like a giant boulder perched at the edge of a towering cliff...

  Wait a minute.

  Before the boulder falls, I should explain that I really don't know what I'm talking about. A story logically begins at the beginning. But this story is about the universe, and unfortunately there are no data for the Very Beginning. None, zero. We don't know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth of a trillionth of a second—that is, some very short time after creation in the Big Bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe, someone is making it up. We are in the realm of philosophy. Only God knows what happened at the Very Beginning (and so far She hasn't let on).

  Now, where were we? Oh yes ...

  Like a giant boulder perched at the edge of a towering cliff, the void's balance was so exquisite that only whim was needed to produce a change, a change that created the universe. And it happened. The nothingness exploded. In this initial incandescence, space and time were created.

  Out of this energy, matter emerged—a dense plasma of particles that dissolved into radiation and back to matter. (Now we're working with at least a few facts and some speculative theory in hand.) Particles collided and gave birth to new particles. Space and time boiled and foamed as black holes formed and dissolved. What a scene!

  As the universe expanded and cooled and grew less dense, particles coalesced, and forces differentiated. Protons and neutrons formed, then nuclei and atoms and huge clouds of dust, which, still expanding, condensed locally here and there to form stars, galaxies, and planets. On one planet—a most ordinary planet, orbiting a mediocre star, one speck on the spiral arm of a standard galaxy—surging continents and roiling oceans organized themselves, and out of the oceans an ooze of organic molecules reacted and built proteins, and life began. Plants and animals evolved out of simple organisms, and eventually human beings arrived.

  The human beings were different primarily because they were the only species intensely curious about their surroundings. In time, mutations occurred, and an odd subset of humans began roaming the land. They were arrogant. They were not content to enjoy the magnificence of the universe. They asked "How?" How was the universe created? How can the "stuff" of the universe be responsible for the incredible variety in our world: stars, planets, sea otters, oceans, coral, sunlight, the human brain? The mutants had posed a question that could be answered—but only with the labor of millennia and with a dedication handed down from master to student for a hundred generations. The question also inspired a great number of wrong and embarrassing answers. Fortunately, these mutants were born without a sense of embarrassment. They were called physicists.

  Now, after examining this question for more than two thousand years—a mere flicker on the scale of cosmological time—we are beginning to glimpse the entire story of creation. In our telescopes and microscopes, in our observatories and laboratories—and on our notepads—we begin to perceive the outlines of the pristine beauty and symmetry that governed in the first moments of the universe. We can almost see it. But the picture is not yet clear, and we sense that something is obscuring our vision—a dark force that blurs, hides, obfuscates the intrinsic simplicity of our world.

  HOW DOES THE UNIVERSE WORK?

  This book is devoted to one problem, a problem that has confounded science since antiquity. What are the ultimate building blocks of matter? The Greek philosopher Democritus called the smallest unit the atomos (literally "not able to be cut"). This a-tom is not the atom you learned about in high school science courses, like hydrogen, helium, lithium, and proceeding all the way to uranium and beyond. Those are big, klunky, complicated entities by today's standards (or by Democritus's standards, for that matter). To a physicist, or even a chemist, such atoms are veritable garbage cans of smaller particles—electrons, protons, and neutrons—and the protons and neutrons in turn are buckets full of still smaller guys. We need to know the most primitive objects there are, and we need to understand the forces that control the social behavior of these objects. It is Democritus's a-tom, not your chemistry teacher's atom, that is the key to matter.

  The matter we see around us today is complex. There are about a hundred chemical atoms. The number of useful combinations of atoms can be calculated, and it is huge: billions and billions. Nature uses these combinations, called molecules, to build planets, suns, viruses, mountains, paychecks, Valium, literary agents, and other useful items. It was not always so. During the earliest moments after the creation of the universe in the Big Bang, there was no complex matter as we know it today. No nuclei, no atoms, nothing that was made of simpler pieces. This is because the searing heat of the early universe did not allow the formation of composite objects; such objects, if formed by transient collisions, would be instantly decomposed into their most primitive constituents. There was perhaps one kind of particle and one force—or even a unified particle/force—and the laws of physics. Within this primordial entity were contained the seeds of the complex world in which humans evolved, perhaps primarily to think about these things. You might find the primordial universe boring, but to a particle physicist, those we
re the days! Such simplicity, such beauty, however mistily visualized in our speculations.

  THE BEGINNING OF SCIENCE

  Even before my hero Democritus, there were Greek philosophers who dared to try to explain the world using rational arguments and rigorously excluding superstition, myth, and the intervention of gods. These had served as valuable assets in accommodating to a world full of fearsome and seemingly arbitrary phenomena. But the Greeks were impressed too by regularities, by the alternation of day and night, the seasons, the action of fire and wind and water. By the year 650 B.C. a formidable technology had arisen in the Mediterranean basin. The people there knew how to survey land and navigate by the stars; they had a sophisticated metallurgy and a detailed knowledge of the positions of stars and planets for making calendars and assorted predictions. They made elegant tools, fine textiles, and elaborately formed and decorated pottery. And in one of the colonies of the Greek empire, the bustling town of Miletus on the west coast of what is now modern Turkey, the belief was articulated that the seemingly complex world was intrinsically simple—and that this simplicity could be discovered through logical reasoning. About two hundred years later, Democritus of Abdera proposed a-toms as the key to a simple universe, and the search was on.

  The genesis of physics was astronomy because the earliest philosophers looked up in awe at the night sky and sought logical models for the patterns of stars, the motions of planets, the rising and setting of the sun. Over time, scientists turned their eyes earthward: phenomena taking place at the surface of the earth—apples falling from trees, the flight of an arrow, the regular motion of a pendulum, winds, and tides—gave rise to a set of "laws of physics." Physics blossomed during the Renaissance, becoming a separate, distinct discipline by about 1500. As the centuries rolled by, and as our powers of observation sharpened with the invention of microscopes, telescopes, vacuum pumps, clocks, and so on, more and more phenomena were uncovered that could be described meticulously by recording numbers in notebooks, by constructing tables and drawing graphs, and then by triumphantly noting conformity to mathematical behavior.