Massive

Massive

Long Road to Princeton

The drive up to Princeton could take the better part of a day, and that was if you were lucky. The route followed the coastline up the eastern seaboard, looped around the broad expanse of the Chesapeake Bay, and went on to Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia before finally arriving in the town that was once home to the greatest physicist of all, Albert Einstein.

Peter Higgs packed some clothes and a folder full of research notes and went out to the car with his wife, Jody, and their six-month-old son, Christopher. He swung the suitcase in the back and had a long look at the road map. Satisfied with the directions, he pulled away, working north and east through the tree-lined streets and out toward the highway as the town eased itself to life beneath the spring morning sun.

It was March 14, 1966. Higgs, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, had moved to Chapel Hill the previous year to spend his sabbatical at the University of North Carolina. His work there had caught the eye of a prominent scientist, who invited him to give a seminar at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, one of the world’s leading intellectual centers and the place where Einstein himself had spent much of his working life. The seminar was destined to be controversial: Higgs had proposed an idea that, if correct, could explain the origin of mass.

The trip turned out to be more than just another academic visit. It marked the beginning of a run of events that catapulted Higgs into the scientific limelight and set the stage for the greatest hunt in modern physics. Using multibillion-dollar machines occupying miles of underground tunnels, thousands of scientists have spent decades looking for the particle that formed the linchpin of Higgs’s theory. Their mantra was simple: find the Higgs particle and the mystery of the origin of mass was solved.

For centuries, scientists had no idea that mass even had an origin, at least not in the modern sense of the phrase. The word “mass” described how much matter an object had, and matter was no more than a grand term for “stuff.” A lump of rock had more mass than a loaf of bread (unless the baker was having an off-day), and that was that. The meaning of mass was so intuitive and tangible that no one seriously thought to question it.

From the book Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science, by Ian Sample.  Excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.  Copyright © 2010.