Higgs Found at ATLAS! April 15, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in Higgs, physics life.trackback
Ok, this wasn’t April 1st, rather April 4th. What is worse is CMS saw him first. Darn!
That picture is of the ATLAS detector and Peter Higgs, the fellow whose last name is attached to the Higgs particle - the particle that all of us are after.
See? ATLAS saw him!
Coincidentally an email conversation broke out on a D0 mailing list around the time of this picture discussing the origins of the Higgs mechanism. It was sparked by this yahoo news article. The title is “‘God particle’ expected to be found soon.” Hmmm. Expected to be found? Not sure we are that sure… At any rate.
The email conversation was interesting because because it pointed out that in science often more than one person has the same idea at the same time. Discovery is partly having all the bits in place to build the discovery on. Once all the bits are in place then several people can make the leap.
I’m not familiar with this bit of history, besides Peter Higgs, there was also Robert Brout, Francois Englert, and Tom Kibble in Europe. There are two in America too - Gerald Guralnik and C.R. Hagen. I note that on the Englert page what we normally call the Higgs mechanism is called the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. On the Kibble page it notes that he is credited with the co-discovery of the Higgs with Guralnik and Hagen, the beauty of wikipedia! 
[they are all basically right, I believe]. Oh — hey — and the UR home page has something up about Hagen as well.
I went to the University of Rochester for my graduate work and my quantum mechanics class was taught by Hagen. At the time I didn’t fully appreciate the work he had done.
GG (who I believe was at U of R at time of Higgs discovery) details the specifics of the Hagen, Kibble, Guralnik team.
See link:
http://chep.het.brown.edu/stlouis-v4.pdf
http://prl.aps.org/50years/milestones
My brother Augustine Samec PhD, has been saying saying this for years but everyone ignored him. I am sick of others getting credit for what he has done.
Higgs has a hell of a PR machine. He was last to the party. Luckiest guy in the world. Irony is he is the one oldest of the six theorists - hope they find it quickly
I don’t know why it was that everything centered on him in the end. Looking back at history there is probably, as usual, a collection of factors that point to why the community, in general, calls it the Higgs. I guess there is a book somewhere I should be reading…
This is easy. See ‘tHooft and Veltman. These two care very much about attribution - and retribution. In the particle physics world, it is thought by the older theorists that t’Hooft and Veltman started referencing this mechanism or boson without the other team. Additionally, t’Hooft feels very strongly that many Europeans have been cut out of their share of Nobel prizes and he is trying to help correct this. The Wolf Prize is one of the results of this effort
Gordon:
Above post should point out that t’Hoft and Veltman are pushing BEH. The Nobel math works this way for the Europeans. Sorry for the omission.
Joe
Thanks, Joe, I had no idea.