HIGGS BOSON

by Scott Southwick

 

 

 

I’m sitting three stories underground, on my desk, which has already been moved out into the hallway, out next to the stack of cardboard boxes of my papers and books, and I’m waiting to hear if these truly are the very last days of the particle accelerator.

 

I admit that things do not look good. It’s the last day of this Congressional session. The provision that could have extended the accelerator’s funding never even made it out of subcommittee.

 

I’m toying with the idea of staging my own one-man sit-in, a hunger strike, except that I doubt I’d make it past 5pm, because I like food too much, and my bed, and Molly, usually.

 

But we need more time, so that we can find the Higgs Boson.

 

 

 

When the phone rings I have to go back into my office to answer. The phone is on the floor and it makes a huge, hard, old-fashioned clatter echoing off the cinder blocks of the empty room. I’m hoping it’s the boss, telling me our stay of execution came through, but it’s Molly.

 

"Anything?" she says.

 

"Nothing," I say.

 

"Maybe it’s just as well," she says.

 

I can’t imagine what she means.

 

"I just mean," she says – and I hear her rustling about on the other end, uncomfortable with my silence – "Maybe it's time to let somebody else take over."

 

"How can you say that?" Since when does she lack faith in the Higgs, in my research?

 

We could detect the Higgs Boson here, next month, next year. Of course it would be easier if they built us a bigger collider, gave us more powerful equipment, but that would take years. Our accelerator is a four-mile loop of tunnel underground, where we sling particles and then smash them into each other and study the results with what's essentially a three-story-high microscope. But four miles is nothing; it's state of the art 1982. To find the Higgs it would be better to have thirty miles, like the French.

 

But even with what we’ve got, we could do it. We just need more time. I thought Molly believed this.

 

"Emma’s coming by, before she leaves town," I tell her. "To drop off some stuff."

 

"Oh, my," Molly says.

 

We say some things and then hang up, and then I go back into the hallway and pace.

 

I should do something.

 

I should have done more.

 

 

 

Here’s the deal: all of contemporary physics is a chain of theory, refined, perilously extended. Every so often the theories have produced a testable hypothesis: there’s an experiment we can run, or will be able to run, when we have better equipment, or more time. For decades, every new element of the Standard Model of physics has been buttressed by these tests. Now there’s only one test left – although by "one test" I mean a million iterations of one test, over years – and the Standard Model will be complete.

 

Alternately, if nobody can produce the Higgs, then all hell breaks loose.

 

The Higgs Boson will vindicate years of faith and cooperation. There is a great pyramid of reasoning and logic and work and faith, a pyramid we all built together, and the capstone is the Higgs.

 

Forty years ago Peter Higgs invented a new particle, out of thin air, to make the math work, to make everything all right. He said, some day, when you have better machinery, then you’ll see my particle. He said, not now; later, and we all agreed to wait and see.

 

That time is coming. I want to be there when it happens.

 

 

 

The Boss pokes his big banana-shaped head around the corner and says, "Hey, you still here?"

 

I acknowledge that I am.

 

"Well, you might as well go home," he chuckles.

 

"Any news?"

 

He looks confused. "You mean about the shutdown?" He shrugs. "Last I heard, they’re shutting us down."

 

The Boss used to be a good scientist, but he is now a bad administrator, and may even be a bad man. His big banana-shaped head has a little tuft of hair sticking out the top of it, and I can’t help but stare at it as he leans close to me and punches me on the shoulder, good-buddy like, and says: "Hey, it’s not like you’re going to lose your job." He’s so happy. "The Institute will find things for us to do. And don’t you miss working above ground? With windows?"

 

He gazes at the cinder blocks dreamily.

 

People don’t talk about the Peter Principle much anymore. But perhaps they should.

 

I should chain myself to the accelerator, call in the television cameras—

 

Or, I could go running. Some days, at lunch, rarely, I run the track. In high school I was a near-champion runner, the mile, until the knee problems. Now I hardly exercise. But at night, every night, in the bed that I share with Molly, I run the track in my mind. I replay the 1980 State Finals, or I simply become Roger Bannister, 1954, or the Roger Bannister of my time. There’s very little variation to my fantasies; I run the track until I fall asleep.

 

Perhaps if I exercised more I would not need to fantasize like this.

 

When Molly calls back, she says: "I just realized what’s going on. You're actually hoping they might not shut it down."

 

I admit that this is the case.

 

"I’m just starting to figure you out," she says. "You actually think it’s too big and important to shut down. You think that just because they spent millions of dollars on miles of concrete lined with high-powered machines, that nobody would be so foolish as to throw it all away. "

 

I’m staring at four bits of sticky tape on my wall. They form a rectangle.

 

"The unused subway system under Cincinnati," she says.

 

"The city buried under Seattle," she says.

 

"All those failed 19^th-century attempts at English Channel tunnels," she says, as I wince at the word failed. "Face it. Our world is riddled with abandoned efforts."

 

She’s in a mood today. And although I love the way she talks – usually – I can’t understand why today she’s trying to make me feel bad.

 

"I’m trying to help you," she says. "You can't be such a pollyanna. And what the hell does your ex-wife want?"

 

I shrug, over the phone. Like I told her, Emma's dropping some stuff off.

 

Molly mutters something skeptical. "Hey, did you take the garbage out?"

 

I did not.

 

"You’re getting really bad about that."

 

It’s true, but I don’t say anything.

 

She laughs it off: "Of course, you have had rather a lot on your mind."

 

The problem is not her words, but the frustration I feel at her words, the backlash, the oversensitivity. I know what this means. It means she's been pissing me off in small ways for weeks and I haven't been admitting it. Although no incidents come immediately to mind.

 

Didn’t we say we were going to do the work necessary to prevent this?

 

I remember the first time Molly made me mad. It was a small thing, of course: she was critiquing my weeding techniques, one morning in my garden. And I told her to stop, and she stopped, neither of which could have happened with Emma.  It was like a whole new way of living opened up for me at that moment, a world of possibility.  So I immediately developed some theories about how to maintain a healthy relationship, and then I gave Molly some speeches.

 

Standing in my garden with my little trowel I declaimed, "Now we will test this hypothesis."

 

Maybe that sounds corny now. But all the physicists here, we really are working on something together. There are assumptions, assumptions have been made, but they are what we like to call working assumptions: they must eventually be borne out by fact. We go on faith not because there’s an absence of evidence, but because there’s a reasonable expectation of evidence.

 

If this thing and this other thing is true like we think it is, and if we do this and this and this, then there will be a Higgs Boson there to greet us at the end, and all of our work will not have been in vain.

 

This is the beauty of particle physics: we collaborate on elaborate theories, and in the end there’s always an experiment that can validate or invalidate the theory once and for all, can force us to give the theory up if it's not true. My friends in the liberal arts do not have this comfort.

 

 

 

Molly calls back about seven minutes later. "Why can’t you go work with the French?"

 

The French get the Higgs if we give up. Molly knows the French don’t need me.

 

But she’s full of ideas, as always. "Why not just let the French have it? You want somebody to do it, right? Does it have to be you?"

 

Molly’s not like the other girls; she’s a cosmologist. She studies the big picture —not just stars, but their neighborhoods, their implications, how they gather themselves into communities— and she brings to the study a peculiar empathy. After a lecture, I once witnessed a student ask her: "Suppose you were shot into space at the speed of light toward the Crab Nebula–" and Molly interrupted with mock alarm: "By myself?" And there was the shadow over her face I recognized, where she’s picturing herself in the cold reaches of space. She studies the cold reaches of space but has not become like many of us, inured to the implications.

 

She says that the one winter she spent alone, in Boston, after her divorce, she was alone in space. Not like alone in space; rather, she was persistently aware of being a small creature alone on a small ball in one corner of the universe, very aware that she existed only by caprice, made of mortal stuff and destined to crumble soon, forgotten, alone, unloved. She’d lost her faith.

 

Her atheist bastard ex-husband!

 

And today my uptight Methodist ex-wife is going to drop by.

 

After I left my wife I doubted everything. I had not had an affair, per se; I had left Emma first, then gotten together with Molly; but since my wife wouldn’t speak to me, and considered my actions adulterous, they might as well have been. Nothing had come from attempting to do things right. Nothing had been gained by leaving without harsh words, by restraining my passions or any other part of myself; it all ended up in the tubes, with just the same results as if I’d slept with 40 women in 40 nights. Even the guilt was the same. It was the same great wash that came after any relationship, a flood that carries everything away, nothing but a fossil record and nobody left to read the record.

 

It makes me dizzy. How can I avoid making the same mistakes, coming around again to the exact same place? How can I avoid being the man that I am?

 

 

 

I take the cordless phone with me. I could go up, toward the experiment room with the detector the size of a house, but it’s all too huge and bright, and there are probably still people there. Instead I head the twenty feet down the worn concrete of the ramp, down to the pipeline where we sling the particles. I hear the banks of lights fizzling and flickering overhead, see the thing itself, curving away down the tunnel in either direction. I duck under the cold steel of the hand railing, paint chips falling where I touched it. I approach Ring-Joint 1A, where the whole circuit begins and ends, and I run a hand along its coarse curved iron skin. I take the handcuffs out of my back pocket and attach myself to it.

 

 

 

Worse than the guilt was the loss of faith. I suddenly understood why the great religions frowned upon divorce: it made me doubt God. The first marriage had been forever, a song sung about the ends of time, a rising above practicalities. I could see now that any second marriage would be all about practicalities. Maintenance. About preference, things I would and would not settle for. I knew now how to get out of a relationship; now I doubted whether I could resist using this new knowledge. Forever leaving for the milk and not returning. A look in the eye, there’s the exit. You’ve already done the worst thing imaginable.

 

They’re shutting down our accelerator.

 

Why not let the French get there first?

 

Because you want to feel a part of it.

 

 

 

I take the cordless phone out of my pocket, to call the newspaper. But I’ve only got one hand free, so I have to hold it dangling by its antenna clamped between my teeth, while I fish for the phone number in my pocket. Then I discover I’ve bitten the antenna into a right angle.

 

I dial with my thumb, and when the woman at the newspaper answers, the reception is bad.

 

"Hello?" she asks, doubtfully.

 

"I am a world-respected physicist," I begin, "and I have chained myself to my accelerator, to protest lack of funding for the sciences—"

 

"Hello?"

 

I tell her who I am again, as the hiss grows.

 

"Sqwr?" she says. "Mm canthere ur."

 

I say, shit, and she says: kxxkxxkxkxkxkkxkxkx.

 

 

 

The Boss is calling my name, and it echoes down the ramp to me.

 

"There you are." He stands at the foot of the ramp, arms akimbo, like he’s Mr. Clean come to save the day. He sees the handcuffs, looks at them, looks up at me. "You’re stuck? You need a hand?"

 

"It’s a protest," I say, flatly.

 

He clucks. "So where’d you get those? Your bedside table?"

 

Even as I begin to realize that chaining myself to the collider means I can’t get away from this man, he’s under the hand railing and coming at me.

 

"Let’s see, if they’re sex cuffs, there should be a safety release right about—" he reaches around my wrists, deftly, twists something—"right about here."

 

I’m free.

 

He steps back and admires his work proudly.

 

"Thanks," I say, re-clasping myself with my other hand.

 

"Don’t worry, I won’t tell." He chuckles, looks around. "So. This is a little too late, isn’t it?" He raps the collider twice with his knuckles for effect, then flaps his hand. "Ouch. And so who’s coming to witness this little protest of yours, anyway?" He cocks his head, as if he were thoughtful, and pronounces: "If a man chains himself to a particle accelerator and nobody sees it, does it make a sound?"

 

"I’m going to call some journalists."

 

"But they’ll never get in."

 

"Why not?"

 

"I won’t let them in." He says it like it’s a law of nature. "Besides, come on, the place is shutting down. Lights off, phones dead, doors locked, over. Done."

 

That’s fine, I think.

 

That’s not fine, I think.

 

"You want us to bury you here?"

 

I don’t say anything.

 

"Suit yourself."

 

Halfway back up the ramp, he stops beside the main light switch and cranes his neck to make sure I’m looking. Then he throws the switch. I hear the generators cough, see the tunnel begin to black out, block by block, utter darkness coming straight for me – but then he flips it back on. And laughs.

 

 

 

The chain of reasoning goes like this: because the Standard Model requires that certain particles have a mass of zero, but because we later learned these certain particles somehow actually don't always have a mass of zero, then there must be some not-yet-detectable new particle providing the mass. It has been promised that if you throw enough antiprotons at enough protons, if you work hard enough, you will eventually produce this thing, the Higgs, and everything will have worked out.

 

The other chain of reasoning goes like this: in our marriages we made mistakes, misrepresented ourselves in crucial ways, failed to perform the necessary work to prevent resentments, sourness, seepage. It has been vowed that this time we will strive, we will talk, we will challenge each other and ourselves, and then the new thing will not die.

 

 

 

I stand there for a while. Nobody’s going to come unless I call.

 

Grimly I unchain myself and head back for my office. It’s already three o’clock. The phone will work from my office, but I can’t be in my office organizing the protest and be down the hall having the protest at the same time.

 

I call Molly.

 

She starts. "What do you say we go to the mountains this weekend?"

 

"Listen," I say. "I need your help."

 

"Anything," she says.

 

"I’m going to chain myself to the accelerator to protest the shutdown."

 

There’s a pause. Then she asks the question I’ve been dreading: "With what?"

 

I’d lie but she’d know it. "What does it matter with what?"

 

"With our handcuffs?"

 

"Molly, this isn’t about—"

 

"In front of the whole world. My God, you’re so passive-aggressive."

 

I throw the phone against the wall, and then I no longer have a phone.

 

 

 

I never threw things with Emma. Emma threw things.

 

When I remember now the behaviors I came to hate about my ex-wife – well, some of them are such modest offenses, I have to gasp a little. I remember her shushing me in front of my colleagues, over some mildly off-color joke. I think about how she always made me take off my shoes before I could enter my own house. When I picture her I picture her telling me how to drive, how to cook, how to weed.

 

Right down the line, it was my sour lack of response to these things that curdled the marriage.

 

So now I throw things. But have I really made myself into anything, besides my ex-wife?

 

 

 

I’m in a kind of stupor, up on my desk with my head on my knees, when my ex-wife comes around the corner. I haven’t seen Emma in a year, and she looks strange to me. I remember how, back when we lived together, whenever she’d return after a week away, she’d no longer look like when she left. I’d stare and stare. I always suspected she’d been holding her face differently, away from me.

 

"Hey," she says, and gives me a little hug. Then she stands back, and looks into the empty room, and the pieces of telephone everywhere.

 

"Well," she says, and gives me that little shrug.

 

The easy answer might be the true one: she looks different to me because I am no longer looking at her with love.

 

She starts. "So how’s your girlfriend?"

 

Do divorces require petty comments? I can see from Emma's stricken look that she didn't mean to say anything like that, that she'd been composing herself in the car on the way over, I am not going to say–

 

And I'm trying to think of the civilized response when the boss comes around the corner. "Hey, Emma," he barks, and sticks out a hand. Then he turns his head to me and a look of panic crosses his face; he pulls his hand back suddenly, shoves it in a pocket.

 

We all stand there, not quite looking at each other.

 

"Gotta go," says the boss, and then his big unripe banana-shaped head disappears back around the corner.

 

Emma looks old. She was younger when I met her, and I want to know how that could be, how my particular kind of love could have aged her so.

 

She’s always had sharp features, but now they look drawn, pulled back, and she’s pale, and the desultory streaks of blush just accentuate it. The corners of her mouth are still down-pointing little slashes. You’ve seen her before, a harried-looking academic in penny loafers and a frayed ponytail, clutching her books to her chest, staring wide-eyed at the ground as she walks, gingerly, and you’ve wondered: who hurt her?

 

"You look older," she says.

 

We talk about her new job, about her move, San Diego. She tells me she’s sorry about the shutdown: those bastards, she says, and smiles a little. When it’s time to go she gives me the little hug again, and the little head-shake again. Worlds of possible meaning and regret I could barely begin to catalog.

 

I think about asking her to contact some journalists for me. But then I realize: I could borrow somebody’s phone and call Molly back. Molly, who was probably just teasing me about the handcuffs, because she likes to blow me shit. I can ask Molly anything; it’s a shame when I don’t.

 

 

 

They’re shutting down our accelerator.

 

Here’s what we already have underground. In Texas we have sixteen miles of empty tunnel, once intended to house the most powerful collider in history. Congress pulled the plug on that one years ago.

 

So we already have plenty of abandoned tunnels, and now they want me to abandon my tunnel.

 

Many of my colleagues now believe that there are actually ten dimensions – not just height and width and length and time – and that six of these dimensions are folded into themselves, just so; and this makes the math work. You can’t picture this, or describe its beauty to your accountant, or promise it will lead anyone to a cleaner automobile engine or a sharper television screen. But there it is, on the paper, and it works.

 

What happens when the answers are so complicated that nobody outside our field can understand them? Are there no longer any ‘eureka’ moments we can share with people outside our field, no more stories we can tell, nothing more we can teach a man about his world?

 

And so Congress shuts down our pet project, because we couldn’t make enough hearts of senators sing: O! to find the Higgs Boson!

 

Is my chosen field narrow, decadent, of no perceivable value to outsiders?

 

Sometimes I envy the moviemaker, the pop singer, whose work reaches into homes and is loved; or even the biochemist, even the one slaving away for a pharmaceutical giant, who might emerge one day into the light and say I can ease the pain of arthritis! rather than I have confirmed the mass of the charmed quark!

 

But then I realize: there’s nothing I’d trade for the mass of the charmed quark, which is ~1.5 GeV/c².

 

 

 

I dig my running shorts and shoes out of one of the boxes, and I change into them, right there in the hallway. I head down to the circuit, switching on extra lights as I go. Each lightswitch turns on about a city block, and the generators make an audible groan, forcing old lights miles away to sputter back to life.

 

I do my stretches.

 

The machinery is old, I know this. Parts of the circuit look like vintage motorcycle engines strung together. I know that some of its less critical features are now held together with baling wire, electrical tape, bricks, and, at one point, an actual paper clip.

 

I start running, the circuit to my right, perhaps for the last time. Perhaps the machinery is not worthy.

 

As I run, I wonder what might await me in the above-ground office. Will they make me a number-cruncher? Without access to the machinery, the experiment, I would be a man in an office.

 

I think about how, as soon as medical student Roger Bannister met his goal and ran the world's first 4-minute mile, he retired from running, to go back to medicine. To science.

 

I had grandiose theories about how Molly and I would keep our relationship from going wrong. I wonder now if in all my planning I overlooked Rule #1: Try not to be a jerk.

 

Back, sweaty, I jog straight into a colleague's abandoned office and call Molly.

 

"Sorry about that," I tell her.

 

"Shyeah," she says.

 

"You need to pull yourself together, cowboy," she says.

 

"You need to come home," she says. "You need to eat something, and then sleep with your girlfriend."

 

 

 

Physicists use mirrors, you know, to focus those particles, sling them around. You break off a photon and smash it into another photon and you get a spray of quarks, the whole family of quarks. Run a test a million times and maybe you get a Higgs Boson, and you’ll have proven that the work was worth doing, the thoughts were worth proposing.

 

But that night, in my own bed, which is above ground, I can only think of the tunnel, shut down, darkened, water beginning to seep in, all returning to dust.

 

 

 

SCOTT SOUTHWICK’s stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Gettysburg Review and Quarterly West. When in Columbia, Missouri, stop by and see him at Sparky’s Homemade Ice Cream.