How the Higgs Boson Ruined Peter Higgs’s Life
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
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.
Edit: You say "we discovered" so presumably obviously yes you had to lol
Why should a particle (almost) never be allowed to bear the name of its inventor, but an equation or a constant should?
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!
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_W._Anderson
"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,
- and helped found the area of spin-glasses."
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.
Wow what a meaningless phrase.
> Why or how could a professor have an apparatus and plan and staff in place to deal with the challenges of fame?
To solve the problems of fame you need an entourage of people to advise, organise your life, talk to media etc.
Crikey what an unsupportable statement.
Yep, this man owns us at least four more bosons.
Or a lot of bogus articles for our collection of articles that don't matter but fill the shelves and grant you a good boy pat in the back.
(Who's a good scientist? yessss Peter, you are).
> we have to concentrate 125 billion electron volts into one spot
Can't avoid to notice how terrifying would be changing a bulb in such place.
"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."
Source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/05/10/crisis-big-scien...
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.
> 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.
"Cures the heart break of psoriasis!"
Tom Waits in sotto voice "Buddy, you don't know the meaning of heartbreak."
Tom Waits- Step Right Up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2_snSkpULQ
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.
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!"