In a centuries-old Swedish castle near the Arctic Circle, in the fading light of a summer midnight, two of the most brilliant particle physicists in the world made a bet over chocolate.
Does the Higgs boson exist?
It’s no idle query: The underpinnings of particle physics, and our assumptions of how all matter interacts, rely on the particle’s not-quite-proven existence. The 47-year search for that proof now costs a billion dollars a year. And esoteric as their goal seems, scientists argue it’s well worth the effort.
On Tuesday, says Robert Garisto, the physicist and editor judging the castle bet, the public finds out “who’s got to save up money to buy chocolate.”
On the pro side was Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Arguing the contrarian’s side was Janet Conrad, a prominent experimental physicist, also from MIT.
At stake were gold-foiled chocolate coins imprinted with Alfred Nobel’s face – an edible facsimile of the prize given to recipients of the award.
So certain was Prof. Wilczek in his conviction, he offered his skeptical colleague 10-to-1 odds.
Assigning Dr. Garisto to adjudicate was the natural choice. He’s a theoretical physicist and editor of Physical Review Letters – the same journal that published, in 1964, the first arguments for what’s now known as the Higgs mechanism.
“They wrote it out, and the rest is history,” Dr. Garisto said in an interview Monday. “It’s a compelling theoretical argument, but you can always say it really, finally has to be tested. … Most theorists would have thought that was a pretty good bet.”
That bet was made in 2005 at an international conference in particle physics in Uppsala, Sweden. The wager, for which Dr. Garisto still has a signed affidavit, was made at a formal banquet in the echoing caverns of Uppsala Castle.
Six years later, the world has news in the quest for the Higgs boson. As of 8 a.m. ET Tuesday, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will give a hotly anticipated update on their search.
Update: Research team says latest findings narrow search for 'God' particle
It’s nothing definitive – nowhere near the stringent standard of proof this type of science demands for an official “discovery,” which would involve (at most) a one-in-a-million chance of error, or misinterpreting a tiny fraction of a second of decaying subatomic particles.
But it gives a long-anticipated glimpse into what the Higgs boson looks like, and whether it’s there at all.
What is Higgs?
The Higgs mechanism is an explanation of why matter has mass.
The theory contends that particles on their own are massless. It’s only when they run into a sticky, invisible field, called the Higgs field, that they gain mass. That Higgs field gives off a tiny particle called the Higgs boson, or so the theory goes. This is all part of the Standard Model of how particles interact.
Until very recently, there had yet to be a Higgs boson sighting. It’s the sasquatch of particle physics, but more important – and, theoretical physicists will tell you, more likely to exist.
The mechanism, the field and the boson are all named after Peter Higgs, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Edinburgh.
But its origins aren’t that simple: Several people had been doing similar research at the same time; the same journal published articles by Robert Brout, François Englert, Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen and Thomas Kibble that same year, arguing much the same thing. There’s no shortage of contention over who should really get credit for the theory. But the name stuck.
Since 1964, physicists have been trying to prove that theory and find the particle the Higgs field is supposed to give off.
