Elusive

May 1, 2022
A fine biography of a vital 20th-century physicist and his work. The 2012 announcement of the discovery of the Higgs particle made headlines, although few nonscientists understood its importance or were familiar with Peter Higgs (b. 1929), who received most of the credit and the Nobel Prize. Close, a science writer, Higgs colleague, and professor of physics at Oxford, illuminates Higgs' personal and professional life and makes an admirable effort to explain his complex work. The son of a British engineer, Higgs was (like most theoretical physicists) a brilliant student and mathematician. Obtaining his doctorate in molecular physics in 1954, he moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1960 where he taught, made his groundbreaking discoveries, and remains an emeritus professor. Higgs' fame rests on three papers published in the 1960s. Several fellow physicists published on the same subject during that time, and Higgs himself has never claimed exclusive credit. "The great physicist Richard Feynman once remarked that he didn't need any prizes; discovery itself was reward enough. Higgs had a similar attitude," writes Close, who agrees that others covered the same ground but believes that Higgs delivered a more complete description of the physics involved. Many pop-science writers describe Higgs' discoveries as an explanation of how particles gain mass. While an oversimplification, this is not wrong. However, most lay readers want to learn about the universe, the Big Bang, stars, black holes, galaxies, atoms, relativity, and even quantum mechanics; the question of why particles have mass seems abstruse. A lucid writer, Close chooses his words carefully and employs a torrent of analogies, but readers who skipped college physics may have to accept his enthusiasm on faith and enjoy an exciting account of the search, which required building the world's most powerful particle accelerator (and the world's biggest machine): the spectacular Large Hadron Collider beneath the French-Swiss border. An expert examination of "the holy grail of particle physics."

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