Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe: The Hunt for the Higgs Boson

by John W. Moffat

Among the current books that celebrate the discovery of the Higgs boson, Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe is a rare objective treatment of the subject. The book is an insider's behind-the-scenes look at the arcane, fascinating world of theoretical and experimental particle physics leading up to the recent discovery of a new boson. If the new boson is indeed the Higgs particle, its discovery represents an important milestone in the history of particle physics. However, despite the pressure to award Nobel Prizes to physicists associated with the Higgs boson, John Moffat argues that there still remain important data analyses to be performed before uncorking the champagne.

John Moffat is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Toronto and a senior researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Well-known for his outside-the-box research on topics such as dark matter, dark energy, and the varying speed of light cosmology (VSL), his new book takes a critical look at the hype surrounding the Higgs boson. In the process, he presents a cogent and often entertaining history of particle physics and an exploration of alternative theories of particle physics that do not feature the Higgs boson, including his own. He gives a detailed and personal description of how theoretical physicists come up with new theories, and emphasizes how carefully experimental physicists must interpret the complex data now coming out of accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The book does not shy away from controversial topics such as the sociology of particle physics. There is immense pressure on projects like the $9 billion LHC to come up with positive results in order to secure funding for the future. Yet to date, the Higgs boson may be the only positive result to emerge from the LHC experiments. The searches for dark matter particles, mini-black holes, extra dimensions, and supersymmetric particles have all come up empty-handed, with serious consequences for theoretical physics, including string theory and gravity theory.

Genres: Science, Physics, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

John W. Moffat has been a professor of physics for more than three decades. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, a member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and adjunct professor in the physics department at the University of Waterloo. Moffat is well known for his alternative theory of gravity to Einstein's general relativity. He is the author of Reinventing Gravity: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein and Einstein Wrote Back: My Life in Physics.

Reviews

[Brian Clegg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll be honest, when I saw this book I thought ‘Oh no, not another book about the hunt for the Higgs boson,’ and so put off reading it for a long while, but it fact it is far from another me-too book. If you want a good, straightforward book about the what the Higgs is and the basics of the hunt, you should head straight for Higgs by Jim Baggott, but Cracking the Particle Code is quite a different beast.

Two things make this book stand out. One is the author’s personal involvement in the field over a long period, and the other is that he is brave enough not to take the simplistic stance that we’ve found the Higgs and it’s all over, but rather to point out that things are a lot more complicated than the press releases from CERN would suggest, and that there is certainly no sense in which we can say that the standard model is complete and particle physics is signed off. In fact, as Moffat shows, it is entirely possible to generate masses using quantum field theory without the complication of a Higgs boson. He may be a minority voice – but there is certainly a lot that’s interesting about this alternative view.

The book isn’t dominated by Moffat’s own theory as he takes us through the hunt for the Higgs and the implications of the discoveries made at CERN – but equally, lacking the usual need to bolster a career that means once a theory gains enough followers it becomes gospel until there’s a major shift (Fred Hoyle likened such physicists to a flock of geese), Moffat is able to give us a uniquely balanced viewpoint.

It isn’t the easiest read – although in some ways he gives one of the best explanations of symmetry breaking (something that rarely makes sense in popular attempts to explain it as it is dependent on a mathematical world rather than anything observed), his science does crack along at a pace that requires a fair amount of application of a piece of advice I received early on while an undergraduate studying physics when my supervisor said that the only way to cope is not to panic when you don’t understand – let it flow over you, and gradually it will make sense.

If you are happy to take that approach, then I can’t recommend this book too highly. If you want an easy, hand-held read, though, look elsewhere.

[Lawrence Plummer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very challenging book, at times I felt that I was back at the UW in my third year physics class. Going into the book, I had been under the impression that the Higgs Boson was pretty much a finished discovery. As of 2014, not quite. An interesting look at the background on the effort to prove the existence, this was a nice read. I'm not sure about the description of the book as "one for a lay person", this seemed to be a touch above that!

[Dendi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the story just not the writing style

[Dan Zarfati · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book deals with the politics behind the finding of the Higgs Bosom. Fairly interesting book.

[S.P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moffat appears to be strangely obsessed with Nobel prizes and CERN funding - perhaps in his skepticism of the Higgs discovery he is suggesting that a continued awards on both these fronts is likely to be dependent on a positive result of the LHC experimental data.

While this may seem to be a bit of sour grapes, Moffat does point out many problems with the standard model because of the the Higgs and the lack of any evidence for the myriad of theories created to correct these problems (LHC seems to have ruled out super-symmetry, micro black-holes, extra dimensions, other exotic particles...)

Moffat is scathing about 'psuedoscientific' theories such as multiverse and anthropic theories used to explain what appears to be absurd amounts of 'fine tuning' needed for the standard model to work.

The theories of course are all well beyond me, however as a general thought I would tend to agree with Moffat in that fudge factors to make a theory works would seem to indicate that there is a lack of understanding somewhere, rather than a need for more fudges.

In short Moffat suggests there may be a bit of a problem with the Standard Model that has been promoted in the last 40 years and that a 'change of guard' of physicists in needed to allow new thinking.

In the last chapter Moffat covers the final announcement from the LHC prior to the refurbishment of the facility, which seems to indicate that the newly found particle is the Higgs boson.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book for the layman, not the specialist. Nevertheless, it is a challenging read, and the more background you have the easier it is to follow. While I found it a slog, I also found it a rewarding read and it is a book I may return to in order to better wrap my mind around its arguments.

The author lays out the basic foundations of the Standard Model in the mathematics of symmetry, the reason that we would expect to see the Higgs boson, and what kind of experimental results physicists looked for in the LHC and other colliders. He also goes beyond these basics in several interesting ways. First, he expresses reasons to be skeptical of the announced discovery of the Higgs boson, and adds some technical detail to the discussion of how sure we can be of the discovery. Secondly, he goes through some alternatives to the Higgs boson for solving the problems it was proposed to deal with, and what kind of results we could expect to support such a hypothesis (This was probably the most challenging part of the book for me to follow.) Thirdly, he looks beyond the specific issue of the Higgs to critique the broader issues that concern modern physics: "naturalness" (the notion that quantities in fundamental physics should form ratios "of order 1" - that is, that the numbers should be small) and "fine tuning" (the circumstance that natural constants must be very precisely determined in order to allow the existence of the universe we observe.