JENNY CRAIG CONFRONTS LADY HIGGS-BOSON
by Bob Arter

          In this brisk little essay, I intend only to say a few words about the particle that lent this magazine its name -- the Higgs boson, or so-called God Particle.

          Physicists have seen fit to deify the Higgs in this manner because it would seem to be the key to the proper working of the Standard Model, which any physicist worth his or her salt will tell you is a description of how the cosmos works, and all that it contains -- so far as we know.

          In short words, the Higgs boson -- which, incidentally, has never actually been located -- is believed to be responsible for imparting mass to matter. 

          I know: it seems self-evident that all physical matter possesses mass, but physicists -- let's choose one; I'll call him Roy -- take nothing for granted. If, say, an electron has mass, Roy will argue, some mechanism must have put it there. 

          A pal of Roy's, one Peter Higgs, said exactly that in 1966, proposing that the particle must exist. Moreover, Higgs argued, it must interact with every other crumb of matter that comes begging for its own morsel of mass, doling the stuff out as it sees fit.

          And what is mass, precisely? Well, it isn't weight, as is widely believed. Mass is merely a property of matter; it becomes weight in the presence of a gravitational field. An astronaut with her toes in the tide here on Earth may weigh 110 pounds (and possess 55 kilograms of mass). Put her in a weightless environment and she weighs nothing, a clear triumph for Jenny Craig. Her mass: 55 kilograms. Weight is a force, the force that gravity exerts on a given mass in the direction of whatever gives rise to the gravity. In this case, the direction would be toward the center of the Earth.

          Since that gravitational field is damnably hard to alter, Ms. Craig's task is to remove as much mass as possible from her client's body. No thin thighs without demassification.

          Questions arise; in fact, they abound. How does a particle interaction create mass where no mass existed before? If the Higgs boson indeed imparts mass to other particles, how does it acquire its own mass? From another Higgs boson? Then what of the first Higgs boson? Clearly, a headache in the making. 

          Happily, we are blessed, or so we choose to believe, with another phenomenon: the Higgs field. Just as an electromagnetic field fills the universe uniformly, into its every cranny, a sea through which photons may sail at lightspeed, Roy has posited that the Higgs field fills it likewise. It's everywhere you want to be.

          Now for the tricky part. According to Roy, as particles pass through this field, it exerts a sort of drag on them, much as the stuff of air imposes a frictional drag on whatever passes through it. Now, the drag is proof of mass, and here we must turn for the moment to one of history’s most unlikable characters, Sir Isaac Newton. Newton demonstrated that some force is required to cause a particle (or refrigerator, or comet) possessing mass either to accelerate or decelerate. That is, mass is simply an object's reluctance to speed or to slow. It is the source of inertia.

          We can observe inertia. We know that we must apply some force to an object to alter its velocity or direction. We can witness a moving object's momentum, which is just its mass times its velocity.

          Ergo mass. And enter the Higgs field, which initially causes the particle to slow, stagger, or boogie with the application of the field's force. So it has clearly acquired mass. And a Higgs boson (a boson is any particle that transmits some force or effect to a fellow particle) obtains its own mass through the identical process—by making its own way through the Higgs field. 

          I'll share a secret: I don’t believe Roy gives a damn about discovering the boson. I think he merely wants to resolve a small conflict (he would call it a "broken symmetry") in the masses of particles. The photon. The photon's mass is zero; hence, no interaction with Higgs. Okay, but an electron is very nearly massless, while the so-called Z and W particles -- not to mention the top quark -- sport some 200,000 times the electron’s mass. There is a job for Jenny Craig; Roy merely wonders, "Why?"

          Here's a useful question: Who cares? Well, Roy does, with good reason. The mass of everything depends on the Higgs. And therefore, so does its size. If an electron were lighter, its orbit would be larger, and so would the entire universe. I doubt we'd know the difference, but still . . .

          Physicists seek answers to these and other of Nature's secrets in particle accelerators. In 2005 the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European nuclear radiation center near Zurich, will come on line. Roy has pinned his hopes on that ungodly contraption.

          There is, of course, a chance that Higgs and Roy and all of their ilk are simply wrong, and no Higgs boson, no God Particle, exists. And that, my friends, might be the most exiting discovery of all. For then, we would be obliged to sharpen our pencils, have another long look at the night sky, and start all over again.