The Infinity Puzzle The personalities politics and extraordinary science behind the Higgs boson Frank Close
Download As PDF : The Infinity Puzzle The personalities politics and extraordinary science behind the Higgs boson Frank Close 
We are living in a Golden Age of Physics. Forty or so years ago, three brilliant, yet little-known scientists - an American, a Dutchman, and an Englishman - made breakthroughs which later inspired the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva a 27 kilometre-long machine that cost ten billion dollars, took twenty years to build, and finally discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The Infinity Puzzle is the inside story of those forty years of research, breakthrough, and endeavour. Peter Higgs, Gerard 't Hooft and James Bjorken were the three scientists whose work is explored here, played out across the decades against a backdrop of high politics, low behaviour, and billion dollar budgets. Written by Frank Close, the eminent physicist and award-winning writer, The Infinity Puzzle also draws upon the author's close friendships with those involved.
In July 2012, in the days leading up to the momentous announcement that the Higgs boson had indeed been discovered, Frank Close and Peter Higgs were together at a conference in Sicily. In this paperback edition, Close includes a substantial epilogue reflecting on the announcement, its implications, and the impact on Peter Higgs and others.
The Infinity Puzzle The personalities politics and extraordinary science behind the Higgs boson Frank Close
The theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) which describes the interaction of light and matter is the most accurate theory in all of science, providing almost unbelievably accurate agreement with experiment. Yet in the middle of the twentieth century the theory was in a deep crisis. Calculations of even the simplest of events in the subatomic world, like the absorption and emission of a photon by an electron, seemed to give nonsensical infinite results that flew in the face of finite values from experiment. These infinities dotted the landscape of physics like ugly tumors, leading some to believe that physics was fundamentally on the wrong track. But hope was at hand. It took a whole post-war breed of brilliant young scientists to invent an ingenious set of tricks collectively called "renormalization" to get rid of these infinities and restore the theory to a complete form. Renormalization not only axed the infinities in QED but became the test that any fundamental theory of physics had to pass before being deemed acceptable. In a stunning set of successes, it was applied to the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces and then to the strong force holding protons and neutrons together. In this book Frank Close tells us how all this happened.Close's book is not only a clear description of renormalization but is also probably the most detailed popular history of post-war particle physics that I have read. Close starts with QED and how its brilliant expositors like Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman developed renormalization techniques to exorcise its infinities. After this, the major part of the book deals with comprehensively describing one of the great triumphs of modern physics - the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces by Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam. This theory had to be again shown to be renormalizable, a momentous feat that was achieved by Dutch physicists Gerard 't Hooft and Martin Veltman. Along the way we are also treated to a fast-paced account of developments leading to the conjecture of the Higgs boson which was originally proposed to explain the difference in masses between the carriers of the electroweak force (the massive Z and W bosons) and the electromagnetic force (the massless photon). And finally Close describes one of the last pieces of the subatomic puzzle, the unraveling of the strong force inside atomic nuclei and the structure of protons and neutrons. These developments capping the understanding of the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions paved the way to the creation of the Standard Model of particle physics, the crowning glory of physics that encompasses all known particles and forces except gravity and predicts the Higgs boson.
However, the most fascinating aspect of Close's book in my opinion is not the lucid description of these technical details but the way it sheds light on both the nature of discovery and most importantly, the human side of science. As Close himself says, science as it appears to the public seems to consist of a few heroes marching resolutely on a linear trajectory to the truth. But as he marvelously documents, the truth is very different and way more messy and non-linear. Science is as much an unpredictable human drama as an exploration of nature's secrets. In every part of the story we see fallible human beings with all their ambitions, prejudices and flaws. There are lots of cases where scientists give up promising leads because of unfavorable remarks or neglect by others and have their discoveries scooped up later by fellow scientists who then win a Nobel Prize. We also read about the Nobel Laureate P. W. Anderson using insights from a very different field (superconductivity) to make key contributions to the ideas leading to the Higgs. Then there are little-known brilliant scientists like J. C. Ward and Ronald Shaw who have their fundamental ideas ignored because they are relatively unknown junior researchers who are lower in the hierarchy. Nobel Prizes are eagerly sought after, narrowly missed and even lobbied for. Sometimes one can see the almost eerie simultaneous germination of ideas in multiple minds, with some of them blossoming under the right circumstances and others fizzling out because of lack of interest or context. In many such cases, so many people end up contributing to a discovery in so many different ways that assigning credit becomes difficult or impossible. For instance, although Higgs's name is attached to the famous particle, it's clear that at least five others independently had the same ideas. Furthermore, in almost every case that Close documents, there are mutually conflicting accounts by scientists of the exact time, place and source leading to the conception of a key idea. Chance encounters and fortuitous attendances at the right scientific meetings seem to contribute to scientists' thought processes to a disproportionate extent. To his credit Close goes into considerable detail when describing all this and it's truly incredible to realize by reading his account how messy, haphazard and subject to sheer luck the actual process of scientific discovery is. Far from being the sure path to knowledge often depicted by the media, science resembles a zigzag, unpredictable climb over hills and valleys obscured by fog.
Yet the beauty of it is that the truth, whatever it is, is surely out there, and an alert and intelligent mind can recognize it through hard-work, curiosity and mathematical prowess. The emphasis on the latter is especially clear in the book, and it's remarkable to realize the almost terrifying power of mathematics that allowed scientists to conjecture the existence of new fundamental particles of nature through sheer thought alone. In many cases it took fifteen or twenty years before these particles were actually found by experiment. The history of particle physics in this sense shows us what the human mind is capable of.
As Close tells us in the end, these adventures are far from over. The last part of the book is dedicated to the equally heroic and imaginative experimental efforts devoted to verifying the predictions of the theorists, many of which gathered Nobel Prizes. As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) spews out massive amounts of data, scientists are waiting with bated breath for the Higgs or its absence. Either way it would be a momentous event and would point to new, hitherto unexplored directions. Overall I would strongly recommend Close's book as one of the best accounts of both the post-war development of particle physics and of the idiosyncratic human side of science that I have read. The story is as epic as any great novel and packed with fascinating characters. Close tells it exceedingly well.
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The Infinity Puzzle The personalities politics and extraordinary science behind the Higgs boson Frank Close Reviews
Regardless of what one might like to conclude from the enthusiastic reviews quoted on the dust cover, the layman will learn nothing useful about quantum field theory from this book since that is quite impossible. What one will find is a complete and engagingly told tale of some of the most important and exciting events in the history of physics, leading to what has become the most successful theory of modern times.
The saga has all the qualities of a finely crafted suspense novel. Quantum field theory, at first thought to be an elegant and powerful generalisation of quantum mechanics, was soon found to be afflicted with such serious computational inconsistencies that, for a time, it quite fell out of favour. Only the work of the world's finest intellects brought its glorious resurrection.
Prof. Close has exhaustively researched the topic, apparently consulting virtually every important paper, conference proceeding and even personal diaries, supported by interviews with every living scientist who took part in the drama. Although I am intimately familiar with the physics, I learned a great deal about its fascinating history and the personal interactions of the participants.
What emerges is a very different view of grand science than that which is likely to be held by the novice. Instead of the logical, ordered and seamless progression from one great idea to the next, we find that advancements also involve missteps, misunderstandings and missed opportunities, often tainted with personal prejudice and haunted by the spectre of competition. In his carefully constructed account, Prof. Close communicates both the enormous thrill and crushing disappointments that typify advanced research.
I found this book especially entertaining because I was present for the last few acts in the play, know all the participants and did my Ph.D. under one of them (Nobel laureate Abdus Salam). Of course, those not even peripherally involved will still find this book an educational and most enjoyable account of one of the most memorable and dynamic half centuries in the history of physics.
I'm not a scientist so my comments are those of a layman. I found Dr. Close's book to be well-written and worth reading.
The book takes as its focus the development of quantum mechanics into quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics and, what I hadn't encountered before, quantum flavordynamics. The original mathematical models led to numerous infinities which the scientific community that developed these models sought to eliminate at least in part by a process called renormalization. In renormalization, experimental physicists told the theoretical physicists what the answer was and, from what I could tell, the theoretical physicists made the math fit the answer developed by the experimental physicists. Not surprisingly the theoretical physicists found this somewhat unsatisfying. The theoretical physicists struggled to make their theories and the supporting math fit the reality being uncovered by experiment. If you're interested in what these theories propose about physical reality, Dr. Close largely waits until the end of the book to consider some of the nature of our universe as suggested by current scientific understanding.
The book really focuses on who received the Nobel prize or who didn't receive the Nobel prize and why this may have occurred. Dr. Close provides insight on the effect of ambition, ego, and personality in the pursuit of the highest prize in science. The book is worth reading for this alone. Feynman,Weinberg, Salam, Gell-Mann,Oppenheimer and others who dominated the development of the Standard Model and quantum mechanics largely from the middle to the end of the twentieth century find their place in the story. Others, less familiar or unfamiliar to me, t'Hooft, Higgs and Bjorken have their substantial contributions explained.
The theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) which describes the interaction of light and matter is the most accurate theory in all of science, providing almost unbelievably accurate agreement with experiment. Yet in the middle of the twentieth century the theory was in a deep crisis. Calculations of even the simplest of events in the subatomic world, like the absorption and emission of a photon by an electron, seemed to give nonsensical infinite results that flew in the face of finite values from experiment. These infinities dotted the landscape of physics like ugly tumors, leading some to believe that physics was fundamentally on the wrong track. But hope was at hand. It took a whole post-war breed of brilliant young scientists to invent an ingenious set of tricks collectively called "renormalization" to get rid of these infinities and restore the theory to a complete form. Renormalization not only axed the infinities in QED but became the test that any fundamental theory of physics had to pass before being deemed acceptable. In a stunning set of successes, it was applied to the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces and then to the strong force holding protons and neutrons together. In this book Frank Close tells us how all this happened.
Close's book is not only a clear description of renormalization but is also probably the most detailed popular history of post-war particle physics that I have read. Close starts with QED and how its brilliant expositors like Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman developed renormalization techniques to exorcise its infinities. After this, the major part of the book deals with comprehensively describing one of the great triumphs of modern physics - the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces by Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam. This theory had to be again shown to be renormalizable, a momentous feat that was achieved by Dutch physicists Gerard 't Hooft and Martin Veltman. Along the way we are also treated to a fast-paced account of developments leading to the conjecture of the Higgs boson which was originally proposed to explain the difference in masses between the carriers of the electroweak force (the massive Z and W bosons) and the electromagnetic force (the massless photon). And finally Close describes one of the last pieces of the subatomic puzzle, the unraveling of the strong force inside atomic nuclei and the structure of protons and neutrons. These developments capping the understanding of the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions paved the way to the creation of the Standard Model of particle physics, the crowning glory of physics that encompasses all known particles and forces except gravity and predicts the Higgs boson.
However, the most fascinating aspect of Close's book in my opinion is not the lucid description of these technical details but the way it sheds light on both the nature of discovery and most importantly, the human side of science. As Close himself says, science as it appears to the public seems to consist of a few heroes marching resolutely on a linear trajectory to the truth. But as he marvelously documents, the truth is very different and way more messy and non-linear. Science is as much an unpredictable human drama as an exploration of nature's secrets. In every part of the story we see fallible human beings with all their ambitions, prejudices and flaws. There are lots of cases where scientists give up promising leads because of unfavorable remarks or neglect by others and have their discoveries scooped up later by fellow scientists who then win a Nobel Prize. We also read about the Nobel Laureate P. W. Anderson using insights from a very different field (superconductivity) to make key contributions to the ideas leading to the Higgs. Then there are little-known brilliant scientists like J. C. Ward and Ronald Shaw who have their fundamental ideas ignored because they are relatively unknown junior researchers who are lower in the hierarchy. Nobel Prizes are eagerly sought after, narrowly missed and even lobbied for. Sometimes one can see the almost eerie simultaneous germination of ideas in multiple minds, with some of them blossoming under the right circumstances and others fizzling out because of lack of interest or context. In many such cases, so many people end up contributing to a discovery in so many different ways that assigning credit becomes difficult or impossible. For instance, although Higgs's name is attached to the famous particle, it's clear that at least five others independently had the same ideas. Furthermore, in almost every case that Close documents, there are mutually conflicting accounts by scientists of the exact time, place and source leading to the conception of a key idea. Chance encounters and fortuitous attendances at the right scientific meetings seem to contribute to scientists' thought processes to a disproportionate extent. To his credit Close goes into considerable detail when describing all this and it's truly incredible to realize by reading his account how messy, haphazard and subject to sheer luck the actual process of scientific discovery is. Far from being the sure path to knowledge often depicted by the media, science resembles a zigzag, unpredictable climb over hills and valleys obscured by fog.
Yet the beauty of it is that the truth, whatever it is, is surely out there, and an alert and intelligent mind can recognize it through hard-work, curiosity and mathematical prowess. The emphasis on the latter is especially clear in the book, and it's remarkable to realize the almost terrifying power of mathematics that allowed scientists to conjecture the existence of new fundamental particles of nature through sheer thought alone. In many cases it took fifteen or twenty years before these particles were actually found by experiment. The history of particle physics in this sense shows us what the human mind is capable of.
As Close tells us in the end, these adventures are far from over. The last part of the book is dedicated to the equally heroic and imaginative experimental efforts devoted to verifying the predictions of the theorists, many of which gathered Nobel Prizes. As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) spews out massive amounts of data, scientists are waiting with bated breath for the Higgs or its absence. Either way it would be a momentous event and would point to new, hitherto unexplored directions. Overall I would strongly recommend Close's book as one of the best accounts of both the post-war development of particle physics and of the idiosyncratic human side of science that I have read. The story is as epic as any great novel and packed with fascinating characters. Close tells it exceedingly well.
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