The recluse who confronted the mystery of the universe

In early October 2013, the Nobel Prize committee was preparing to announce the winner of its award in physics. The leading candidate — as pretty much everyone knew — was an 84-year-old Scottish scientist named Peter Higgs, who was not feeling nearly as joyful as you might think. Yes, he wanted to win the award, yes, he wanted to be recognised for his pioneering insights into how subatomic particles build our universe. He just wanted to be recognised for it quietly.

But as a theorist already heralded for his 1964 work predicting the Higgs boson (sometimes called the God particle), he knew he was pipe-dreaming. He could almost hear the thunder of microphone-wielding journalists advancing on his Edinburgh apartment. So he made a pre-emptive decision: “I decided not to be home.” On the morning of the announcement, Higgs crept out his back door, caught a bus to a nearby town, tucked himself into a pub and hunkered down with a medicinal pint of ale.

Thus, when Higgs did win the Nobel (along with the French physicist François Englert), neither journalists nor fellow physicists could find him. “We don’t know where he is,” one University of Edinburgh colleague sadly explained to an exasperated reporter. One is left to wonder if Frank Close chose the title for Elusive as a reference to the glimmering subatomic particle of Higgs’s theory — or to the theorist himself.

As Close notes, “Peter Higgs has managed to avoid much of the pace of modern life.” He does his best to avoid both email and cell phones. Close, a physicist himself and the author of numerous popular science books, is a long-time colleague and friend of Higgs’s, but to research this volume he was forced to mail reminder letters to confirm appointments. Their conversations, not entirely revealing, were mostly conducted via Higgs’s treasured landline phone. As a result, although his publisher describes Elusive  as “the first major biography of Peter Higgs,” Close seems less sure of that, describing his book as “not so much a biography of the man but of the boson named after him.”

Close’s description is more accurate. The biographical facts add up to more of a brisk sketch than a richly detailed portrait. This is not to deny that there are moments of sharp and even bitter insight: Higgs’s belief that his antisocial personality developed during a sickly and lonely childhood in northern England — “I grew up a rather isolated child”; his marriage and its failure because of his workaholic habits; a resulting, paralysing depression; his dedication to social justice causes, which at one point led him to suspect that he had “become an embarrassment” to some of his colleagues. After all, Higgs notes modestly, “The portion of my life for which I am known is rather small — three weeks in the summer of 1964.”

It is those three weeks that anchor the real story in this book, a clear, vivid and occasionally even beautiful portrait of a scientific breakthrough: the tale of how a relatively obscure Scotland-based physicist developed a stunning theory, one that would help illuminate the invisible, particulate web that holds our universe together. And how in the following decades, the research community would argue, debate, build and expand on his idea, setting out on a quest to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson and with it our own understanding of the universe.

At a basic level, Higgs’s theory belongs to a fundamental and puzzling question: Where does the mass of the universe come from? Using the known rules of physics, from electromagnetism to quantum mechanics, Higgs raised the possibility of an unstable subatomic particle that, through a series of fizzing interactions, could lend mass to other particles. He predicted this particle would be a boson — a notably massive subatomic particle that helps hold matter together — and that it would exist in an energy field that enabled the interactions. Higgs suggested a path to confirming the existence of the boson and the eventual measurement of its decay products. In doing so, Close writes, the theory issued a subtle challenge: “Is this just a clever piece of mathematics or does nature really work this way?”

Close uses that question as a launching point, taking the reader through much of the history of particle physics and introducing the key players, the insights by others in the field who moved the ideas forward and the eventual decision to build a machine in Switzerland — the Large Hadron Collider — to test the possibilities. The LHC would find confirmation for the boson’s decay products in 2012. Close brings to this story an insider’s knowledge and a combat-ready willingness to defend Higgs against his occasional critics, at one point dismissing the high-profile British physicist Stephen Hawking as a man with a “singular genius for playing the media.”

In other words, this is a very human telling of the ways that we’ve figured out at least some of the mysteries of our universe since the mid-20th century. “What does the discovery reveal about the cosmos and our place in the universe?” Close wonders, and he ends his book on a note of additional mystery, reminding us that there are great achievements in physics to come and that tantalising questions still shine in front of us, their answers still out of reach, ever elusive.

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