Interview with Christopher Hill

Promethean: The discovery of the Higgs boson, also known popularly as "the God Particle," has had worldwide impact in the media and throughout the scientific world, and recently led to a Nobel Prize for Englert and Higgs. Why is this so significant a discovery?

Christopher Hill: The Higgs boson is a fundamental particle of a type we have never seen before. It forms a field, throughout all of space, much like the particles of light form the magnetic field of the earth. Ordinary matter interacts with this field and this causes things to acquire mass. This is an extraordinary break-through in our modern understanding of all of nature, for which we have been waiting almost forty-five years. The Higgs boson poses a whole new set of questions that will occupy scientists for the next century and beyond. These are the issues we address in the book.

Your books with Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman (Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe and Quantum Physics for Poets) are well known for lucid yet "grown-up" explanations of conceptually challenging topics. How do you explain something so abstract as the Higgs boson to a layperson?

We avoid the use of equations, yet try to give a detailed picture of the concepts, one that has true validity. I don't like cheap explanations of things, like "the Higgs boson is a kind of molasses and it drags, particles causing mass." We strive to show the evolution of the human understanding of the concept of "mass," from Democritus, to the profound insights from quantum theory and elementary particles that led to the Higgs boson, with all the major steps clearly in place. The story is thrilling, like a great mystery novel spanning almost three millennia. The impact upon our society and economy also comes clearly into focus.  

The term "God Particle" has stirred people up, although Forbes.com recently wrote on the origin and benefits of that nickname.  What's your take on all of that?

Our title is Beyond the God Particle, and we discuss this in chapter one, exploring some of the associated "sturm und drang." It's only literary license, and definitely does not imply some deeper connection of the Higgs boson to religion. Leon Lederman, one of the greatest scientists of the modern era, is also quite a humorist, and this term he coined has appeared everywhere, from Tibet to Timbuktu. "Timbuktu?" says Leon, "I have an uncle who sells bagels in Timbuktu."

Christopher Hill Photo © Reidar Hahn

What impact will this discovery have on our daily lives?

While it's hard to predict precisely what will be the impact, modern economists tell us that it will indeed lead to significant economic gain. In fact, it was at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, where the Higgs boson was just discovered, that the World Wide Web was born as a spin-off of new particle physics technologies in the 1990's. Today it's a multi-trillion dollar component of global GDP. People often say, "Oh well, that's just a spin-off... what is the direct result of this research?" All science driven economy happens through spin-offs. You go into the lab either to develop a product (Edison) or you go there to discover laws of nature (Fermi, Einstein). The latter approach produces greater and more lasting effects.

Ironically, the World Wide Web emerged from CERN at about the same time that the US Congress canceled the super-collider project in Texas, costing the US the discovery we now celebrate, and ultimately costing us significant economic gain. Much of basic research is suffering today by US funding austerity. We hope to draw our readers' attention to this fact. Particle accelerators are the world's most powerful microscopes, and microscopes have always proven useful to humanity. By the way, I find that when it's presented this way the audience never asks me, "What good is all of this?"

Your book was described by one reviewer as "great material for anyone who has been subjected to ... any number of other [explanations and] metaphors that don't really explain anything. Lederman and Hill go way beyond this... For someone who wants to understand as much as possible about what 'particles get mass from the Higgs' means... this is the place." What is your goal in writing such a book?

We feel strongly that a basic scientific literacy of our fellow citizens is at the heart of our future success as a democracy. We are mainly motivated by the heroic discovery of the Higgs boson in Europe that involves a community of about ten thousand physicists worldwide and a collaboration of a scale of tens of billions of dollars, leading to one of the most profound insights in scientific history. And yet, uninformed magical thinking has the US stepping back from science and its necessary funding. The US cannot be the kind of nation we all want in a modern world if it doesn't compete in a big way on all scientific frontiers.

God and the Atom

Readers curious about how we came to learn about subatomic particles can also turn to Victor Stenger's God and the Atom: From Democritus to the Higgs Boson: The Story of a Triumphant Idea. Stenger, who has authored many books on physics and the universe, takes readers on a journey through the history of atomism, describing the discoveries that have culminated in our current understanding of the nature of matter.

For all of us who yearn to know more about the makeup of the universe - and don't have access to hadron colliders - reading about physics is the next best thing!

Have a great October,

Prometheus Books

publicity@prometheusbooks.com