of over a dozen books, including The Infinity Puzzle and Half-Life. He lives in Oxford, England.
Close applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass, and reported the following:
Elusive is the story of one man's big idea - the only one he had in his entire life - one which would change forever our understanding of the material universe. On page 99 we meet him, Englishman Peter Higgs, in 1966, en route to North Carolina where he planned a sabbatical visit to the university. It would be during Higgs’s year there that he would write the paper describing the “Higgs boson”. 48 years and $10 billion in expenditure later, his remarkable theory was proved right. Higgs won the Nobel Prize in 2013 but on page 99 we have little hint of this. Were you to read this page alone you would think Elusive to be a history or a travelogue describing the beauty of West Virginia and North Carolina as well as the social conditions there in those days. Higgs’s experiences in the south of 1966 helped forge his social conscience and political views. Pages 1 to 98 and 100 to 248 tell how the professor became as elusive as the particle that bears his name.Follow Frank Close on Twitter and Facebook.
In the summer of 1964, Peter Higgs had the “only really original idea I’ve ever had”. Two years later, on that visit to the University of North Carolina, he wrote the paper in which the Higgs boson, the visible confirmation of which would turn out to prove his idea, would be forged. Then for the rest of his life he did nothing more, not just with his own idea but by and large in the whole of science.
An analogy to his insight that we are immersed in some strange stuff known as the Higgs field is that as fish need water, so we need the Higgs field. If the vacuum of space were truly empty, then according to Higgs’ theory it would be unstable. But add the Higgs field to this state of nothingness and the universe becomes stable. That adding something to nothing makes for stability is counter intuitive - but that is part of the magic and perhaps the reason why this idea had laid dormant for so long.
While Higgs did no more with it, others built on his idea and by 2000 were designing a vast machine - the Large Hadron Collider accelerator of particles in Geneva. The goal was to produce the Higgs boson, the existence of which would confirm the entire theory and have profound implications for our understanding of the cosmos. The Higgs boson was finally discovered on the 4th of July 2012, 46 years after Higgs's seminal paper written during his visit, which began on page 99.
Why the particle had taken so long to find, indeed why it was so elusive, is one strand of the tale. There is another one. Following the boson’s discovery, Higgs was regarded to be a shoo in for the Nobel Prize in 2013. Higgs hates the limelight, and so didn't want to be around when the media descended for his reactions. On the day that the award was to be announced he disappeared to his favourite seafood bar without telling anyone where he had gone. The Nobel awarders and the world’s media searched for him in vain. Peter Higgs had become as elusive as the boson that bears his name.
--Marshal Zeringue
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