After we discovered the particle in June 2012, there was a large summer conference in Stockholm (a good few months before the Nobel announcement). In the spirit of jubilation the Municipality had arranged a classical “Nobel” reception at the Mayor’s Hall and banquet at the Vasa Museum in the evening.
As a good friend of the chair of the organizing committee, I was asked to help that evening, collecting invitations as people entered. After greeting the first 100 or so, up came this elderly man who has lost his invitation. He was very sorry, and asked if there was any way for him to prove he in fact was invited. I told the gentleman, that he could have mine in case there was any trouble. As Peter Higgs was allowed to enter the little dress rehearsal for what was to befall him in autumn, there was a warm chuckle around us.
I have met him on other occasions and perhaps it is exactly his non-selfish personality that has allowed the particle to carry his name in the first place. The rest of particle physics is luckily void of attributing eternal properties of nature to individuals.
>The rest of particle physics is luckily void of attributing eternal properties of nature to individuals.
Physicists are blessed! Some fields are polluted with proper name derived jargon. Then learning anything is comparable to learn the phone book by rote. It sucks!
Physics is absolutely crammed with person names, though. Maxwell’s equations, Newtown’s laws, Boltzmann distributions, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein’s summation convention, Green’s formula, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, etc etc etc. Not that I think it’s a problem.
Even if this were true (see, Newton's laws, Lagrangians and on and on), it's an odd claim that memorizing "quark" is any easier than remembering what a Hamiltonian is. Not to mention that memorizing jargon is a triviality barely worthy of footnote compared to actually learning the field.
Newton might look foundational as 1 N = 1 kg * m/s^2, but if the kilogram had been defined as 1% smaller or the meter larger then so presumably would the Newton.
It is named after Prof Satyendra Nath Bose. A physicist and true polyglot from pre-independent India. He was in his twenties when he figured this out. Of course never really received any larger fame, as is customary for Theoretical scientists from South East Asia (well most of the time) but if anyone is interested here is the story - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose
You got me. But being a Fermion or a Boson is (IMO) a label for a generic property. and we have plenty of other such theoretical constructs named after the inventor: Weyl, Dirac, etc. we need language and labels to communicate ideas, so that is alight. But the Higgs particle and mechanism represents physical reality (now at least) which brings it to the level of electrons, quarks and the fundamental forces of nature. These names will stand for as long as our civilization. Who cares that someone predicted them a couple of years before their discovery when we are a century down the line.
Just imagine if fire was known as the Peterson effect?
Anyway that’s just my opinion.
I question both the point and the well-definedness of this distinction between the concrete and the abstract. Does the Lorentz factor not "represent physical reality" and will it not also stand until the end of civilization?
Why should a particle (almost) never be allowed to bear the name of its inventor, but an equation or a constant should?
We started with up and down quarks, and then discovered the charmed and strange ones. It would have been appropriate, given the trend in quark naming, to call the next two gell and mann, but Feynman would have had a fit.
It was only when I saw the French spelling of Baritone is Baryton that I made the etymological connection between the "heavy" particle and the "heavy" male voice part.
Considering Higgs barely published anything for decades after ruination might not be so bad.
That Nobel was a real shame in that the mechanism was discovered independently by multiple groups, but the prize only allows 3. Kibble had a real claim to it but probably missed out because it would've meant not rewarding his colleagues.
> Considering Higgs barely published anything for decades after ruination might not be so bad.
I'd have never suspected that fame might be a correction to slow progress or discovery. I believe that, in general, fame is a solved problem, but the solution is not available to everyone. Why or how could a professor have an apparatus and plan and staff in place to deal with the challenges of fame? But I think it is a crying shame that just the detail of extreme popularity ruins the work. Even if Professor Higgs had already produced most of his work, as a species and society, everyone and everyone that comes after is hurt by denying him the ability to work and produce, and others before and after him. When will Beatlemania end? Why don't we, collectively, have restraint, have the ability? You'd think as a species by now we would have evolved some kind of completely invisible and odorless biochemical pheromonal response that tells all other humans, "leave me alone, I'm busy." Instead, it takes a staff.
The mechanism was discovered by Anderson. They had to give it to Higgs because otherwise people might realize that theoretical particle physicists don’t do anything real (sorry but not sorry)
"From 1949 to 1984, Anderson was employed by Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he worked on a wide variety of problems in condensed matter physics.
During this period he developed:
- what is now called Anderson localization (the idea that extended states can be localized by the presence of disorder in a system)
- Anderson's theorem (concerning impurity scattering in superconductors);
- invented the Anderson Hamiltonian, which describes the site-wise interaction of electrons in a transition metal; proposed symmetry breaking within particle physics (this played a role in the development of the Standard Model and the development of the theory behind the Higgs mechanism, which in turn generates mass in some elementary particles);
- created the pseudospin approach to the BCS theory of superconductivity;
- made seminal studies of non-s-wave pairing (both symmetry-breaking and microscopic mechanism) in the superfluidity of He3,
> The mechanism was proposed in 1962 by Philip Warren Anderson,[2] following work in the late 1950s on symmetry breaking in superconductivity and a 1960 paper by Yoichiro Nambu that discussed its application within particle physics.
The origin of the name was due to a mistake of Steven Weinberg:
"In his recent book, The Infinity Puzzle (Basic Books, 2011), Frank Close points out that a mistake of mine was in part responsible for the term “Higgs boson.” In my 1967 paper on the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, I cited 1964 work by Peter Higgs and two other sets of theorists. This was because they had all explored the mathematics of symmetry-breaking in general theories with force-carrying particles, though they did not apply it to weak and electromagnetic forces. As known since 1961, a typical consequence of theories of symmetry-breaking is the appearance of new particles, as a sort of debris. A specific particle of this general class was predicted in my 1967 paper; this is the Higgs boson now being sought at the LHC.
As to my responsibility for the name “Higgs boson,” because of a mistake in reading the dates on these three earlier papers, I thought that the earliest was the one by Higgs, so in my 1967 paper I cited Higgs first, and have done so since then. Other physicists apparently have followed my lead. But as Close points out, the earliest paper of the three I cited was actually the one by Robert Brout and François Englert. In extenuation of my mistake, I should note that Higgs and Brout and Englert did their work independently and at about the same time, as also did the third group (Gerald Guralnik, C.R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble). But the name “Higgs boson” seems to have stuck."
The article just says he liked solitude and after being out of the pubic eye fit _40 years_, the Nobel prize made him a public figure temporarily. Hardly life ruining.
Hardly click bait - It’s a direct reported quote from the man himself.
> One of the biggest shocks I had when I was interviewing him was when he said the discovery of the boson “ruined [his] life.” I thought, “How can it ruin your life when you have done some beautiful mathematics, and then it turns out you had mysteriously touched on the pulse of nature, and everything you’ve believed in has been shown to be correct, and you’ve won a Nobel Prize? How can these things amount to ruin?” He said, “My relatively peaceful existence was ending. My style is to work in isolation and occasionally have a bright idea.” He is a very retiring person who was being thrust into the limelight.
Tom Waits had a severe drinking problem in his early years. He bounced around playing piano in dive bars and generally led a hard life until he become successful and quit drinking. He knows a thing or two about heartbreak, so when advertisers use phrases like "The heart break of running out skin cream" he mutters to himself that most people don't know real heart break. Peter Higgs describing his life as "ruined" evoke a similar reaction in me because I've been homeless and drug addicted.
In my street, it is François Englert (or Robert Brout having the intuition) who found it first.
Because his daughter was living in front of my house.
And I'm still wondering why Higgs won the name.
Along the lines of “I won a $100 million dollars and it ruined my life”…
Basically one does not value money, fame, beauty, power etc. if you already have it in plenty. Take it away suddenly and then you will realise how much you were taking your cachet for granted.
Eventually (100+ years) he'll be the answer to a trivia question.
I think a lot of people like modesty in a famous person. It's so different from the posers who want to be famous and go slapping their names on everything.
I would hope that someone like him would give some speeches, the audience would love him, and he'd get a warm glow for the rest of his life that "I did that!"
Many people who loathe fame end up killing themselves because there is no way to “undo” fame, once you realize you can’t go anywhere without hiding your face in various ways (wigs, makeup, sunglasses, etc). Common with rock stars in particular.
As a good friend of the chair of the organizing committee, I was asked to help that evening, collecting invitations as people entered. After greeting the first 100 or so, up came this elderly man who has lost his invitation. He was very sorry, and asked if there was any way for him to prove he in fact was invited. I told the gentleman, that he could have mine in case there was any trouble. As Peter Higgs was allowed to enter the little dress rehearsal for what was to befall him in autumn, there was a warm chuckle around us.
I have met him on other occasions and perhaps it is exactly his non-selfish personality that has allowed the particle to carry his name in the first place. The rest of particle physics is luckily void of attributing eternal properties of nature to individuals.