Of Bosons, Bosies and other matters

the Skeptic, Vol 15 No 1

Book review by Sir Jim R Wallaby

The God Particle: if the Universe is the answer, what is the question, Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi, Delta 1993.

Hands up all those who know what a Higgs boson is! Right, will all those who raised their hands please stop reading this immediately and go back to reading the mind of God.

Now we have disposed of those people, I assume I am left addressing that small sub-section of the human race who comprise the category ‘non-physicist’. We Wallaby’s have refrained from dabbling in physics ever since a remote ancestor, Sir Isaac Wallaby, observed an apple falling upwards and developed his Universal Theory of Levity (or Ytivarg as he also named it). The resulting furore cost him his position as Master of the Royal Mint, which was then awarded to a minor functionary named Newman or Fenton or something like that.

When the term Higgs boson first swam into my ken, I believed it to refer to one of the more arcane practices of the leg spin bowler. A not unnatural mistake as I am sure all my non-physicist readers will agree. After all, Jim Higgs was one of the more accomplished practitioners of the art in the dark interregnum period AB-BW (After Benaud-Before Warne). A ‘bosie’ is an archaic name for the googly (an off break bowled with a leg break action) and the term ‘spin’ was also bandied about. All perfectly logical to me.

But all of that is behind me, since I read The God Particle. Leon Lederman is a physicist who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for Physics for the experiment that proved the existence of the muon neutrino. He was also, between 1979-89, Director of Fermilab, one of the worlds major particle accelerators used for the discovery of ever more obscure building blocks of the universe. Professor Lederman is a nuts and bolts physicist, experimental rather than theoretical, and he is a very funny writer. Dick Teresi is a former editor of Omni magazine, and one imagines he is responsible for ensuring that all the sentences contain verbs and the commas are in place; no mean feat the editor of our own esteemed journal assures me, when dealing with the writings of many whose vocations lie within the sciences. (In fact, in his own crude way, he claimed "The average scientist wouldn’t recognise a gerund if it bit them on the bum".)

The book is a history of the search for the fundamental units of matter, commencing with Democritus, the Ancient Greek who first proposed an indivisible something that lay at the heart of everything (the atomos) and continuing through the history of final, indivisible particles that turned out to be no such thing. On the way, Lederman introduces us to all the great names of science who have advanced our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter and entertains with his personal observations of them.

No dry old history this; fact mixes with anecdote and many a good natured side-swipe at his theoretician colleagues. Speaking of those who are proposing Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), superstrings and supersymmetry, he says "Some of these speculations are truly profound and can be appreciated only by the creators, their mothers, and a few close friends". On the pyramid nature of science "The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God (though you may be hard pressed to find a mathematician that modest)."

Referring to the fact that most of the great theoreticians of the past did their best work when barely out of short pants, he states, "It is a fact that when Dirac and Heisenberg went to Stockholm to accept their Nobel Prizes, they were, in fact, accompanied by their mothers".

Along the way he produces a delicious anecdote on how Erwin Shroedinger (the famous cat owner) set out to solve a major problem in quantum theory. Shroedinger booked into a Swiss chalet for two weeks, "...taking with him his notebooks, two pearls and an old Viennese girlfriend. ... placed a pearl in each ear to screen out any distracting noises. Then he placed the girlfriend in bed for inspiration. Schroedinger had his work cut out for him. He had to create a new theory and keep the lady happy. Fortunately he was up to the task. (Don’t become a physicist unless you are prepared for such demands)", is Lederman’s summation of the affair.

But this is not merely a recounting of quantum tittle tattle, Lederman traces the discovery of ever more fundamental particles and describes the ever larger and more energetic machines that are required to give the experimental proof to the theoretical speculations. He was the driving force behind the proposed Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the 70 km circumference machine which was planned to be built in Waxahatchie, Texas to allow collisions between particle streams at energies never before achieved and which was supposed to unlock the secrets of what may be the ultimate particle. After this book was written, news came that the US Government had withdrawn funding from the SSC project and, having read of Lederman’s enthusiasm in the book, I can imagine how great a blow he must have suffered.

This is the domain of energies of trillions (or more) of electron volts and times lasting trillionths (or less) of a second with all the mysterious sounding language of the quantum state (come to think of it, the analogy with leg spin bowling is probably extremely apt). But no mystic is Prof Lederman. In one interlude in the book, he skewers the publicists of the views that quantum physics and eastern philosophy are in some way connected and has words to say about "...some PhDs in science who push totally off-the-wall things like ‘seeing hands’, ‘psychokinesis’, ‘creation science’, ‘polywater’, ‘cold fusion’ and so many other fraudulent ideas."

In somewhat gentler vein, he gets in some digs at those of his theoretical colleagues whose prognostications seem to stray from science into theology. Referring to God throughout the book, invariably as ‘Her’ and ‘She’, he leaves it to the end to give us his tongue-in-cheek picture of God , not as a gentle and caring New Ageish Mother Earth type at all, but as a "Margaret Mead or Golda-Meir or Margaret Thatchertype of deity". A mind-numbing concept, as I am sure everyone will agree. He even concludes the book with a section headed "Obligatory God Ending", showing that if he had not been obsessed by physics, he could have profitably followed a career writing lurid scripts for Hollywood.

And, of course, the "God Particle" of the title refers to the Higgs boson I mentioned in my introduction. A curiosity of the story , and perhaps a minor disappointment, is that Peter Higgs, the English physicist who theorised this thing, and who gave it his name, is himself given only a few passing references in the book, being described as "of Edinburgh University" when he proposed the concept and as "of Manchester University" and "doing other things" now. I would like to have learned a bit more about Peter Higgs, whose name may be forever associated with the ultimate particle, just as I did about so many of the other seminal names in particle physics through the book.

Much as I would like to be able to tell the readers all the inside information about this very important particle, and why it might lead to a final understanding of nature, that would be like a reviewer of a Whodunnit revealing whodunnit - definitely a lapse of ethical standards. Or, to be absolutely truthful, although I felt I was with Professor Leon Lederman as he went through all the steps from Democritus’ atomos to Higgs’ boson, I am far too canny an old Baronet to risk exposing my fundamental ignorance of fundamental physics in this review.

Finally, all I can say is, if the enterprise of science excites you; if you are intrigued by the acquisition of knowledge; if you would like to have some understanding of the deep, fundamental nature of the universe and of the people who discovered so much of it; if, like me, you do not feel like spending several years of unremitting toil in acquiring a PhD in this most arcane of subjects, and if you are not one of those physicists we disposed of in the first sentence, then this is a book I would recommend to you most highly.