The evidence for its existence comes from many directions, all essentially indirect and theoretical. Scientists have been searching for it since 1984. Because it remains the only particle predicted by the brilliant Standard Model of Weinberg, Glashow and Salam that has not been found, an incredible amount of labor, research and money has gone into looking for it.It also plays an important role in the theories of Cosmic Inflation inspired by the ideas of Alan Guth.
Without going into the technical details, those reasons why most of the physics community believe in its existence, suffice it to say that the search for the Higgs Boson has been the driving force for the proliferation of the ever-expanding, ever-more grandiose facilities in elementary particle research built in the last 2 decades. The Texas Super Collider, begun in 1988 and cancelled in 1993, had the discovery of the Higgs Boson as one of its (if not the) principal objectives.Had it been built the Super Collider would have been 3 times the size of the current Large Hadron Collider. The LHC, located on the grounds of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) outside Geneva, Switzerland, is currently the world's largest particle accelerator.My one ramble into the neighborhood of CERN was in 1972. (Since this properly belongs to the history of the anarchist politics of the 20th century, it's not relevant here.It is however a great story and I may recount it in some future posting.)
By the time Congress decided that the costs for finding a theoretical construct were excessive, seventeen shafts had been sunk and 23.5 km (14.6 miles) of tunnel bored.The left-over Big Hole in the Ground engendered a big hole in the local economy. It was sold to J.B. Hunt in 2006 and converted into a storage center for computer data.
Dire prognostication of a similar nature ensnare the eventual fate of the LHC. If more decades of searching fail to find the Higgs, governments will look twice at the political fallout of continuing to pay for it.
Its' 9 billion dollar budget makes the LHC the most expensive scientific experiment in human history.The funding of CERN and the LHC is assured by a list of 20 European nations that tallies more or less with the European Union. It is all very well to come up with good reasons why there should be apples; it is quite another matter to prove that apples exist by finding one.
Elephants that may turn out to be white can be particularly troublesome when they morph into mastadons: the amount of data that is expected to come out of the LHC is so enormous that there are no computers in existence today large enough to handle it. What this means is that the output will have to be systematically reduced at the source, on the basis of markers (unavoidably intuitive and subjective) indicating that some terrabytes of figures are more likely to be useful than others.This form of triage may very well throw the evidence for the Higgs out with the trash; or, more ominously, lead to the systematic rejection of evidence which does indicate its presence.
Estimates made by sensibly eminent scientists suggest that the search could go on for a century or more, perhaps plunging the human race into an economic crisis from which it might never recover. Given the ever turbulent state of the world, its' endless wars, famines, depressions and natural disasters, it is hard to imagine that even the European Union (or NATO, which significantly overlaps with the EU and the patrons of CERN) would continue to support the search for a purely theoretical particle whose properties make it almost impossible to detect.
Its mass is unknown; paradoxically, in its role as a field it gives mass to everything else in the universe, while its own mass is determined by what is known as vacuum expectation energy. This is the energy that remains after everything else has been removed and only quantum uncertainty jiggles the cosmic plenum.This quote from the Wikipedia article puts it nicely: "In essence, this [Higgs] field is analogous to a pool of molasses that "sticks" to the otherwise massless fundamental particles which travel through the field,converting them into particles with mass which form, for example, the components of atoms."
The real issue, as I see it,is therefore one of finding ways of guaranteeing that the search for the Higgs boson can go on for the next two hundred years. By that time the boson will either be found,the whole human race bankrupt,or the theory behind it abandoned.In the best of all possible worlds (and Leibniz would have had some things to say about the Higgs monad!) a new theory would have emerged in the meantime that kills off the existence, concrete or theoretical, of the Higgs.
The solution in fact lays ready to hand.A student of the great technological achievements of the 20th century quickly discovers that the best way to draw upon, concentrate and administer the energies of many thousands of persons, to get them to commit unlimited amounts of money and long years of work towards a single purpose,is to discover a new way to murder millions of people in the shortest possible time.I propose that all physicists of international stature start telling governments that they know of a way to manufacture a Higgs Boson Bomb!
Two outstanding examples from the 20th century come to mind: the invention, production and employment of the nuclear bombs; and the Final Solution. It is mass murder alone that has the potential for bringing together such huge resources in a world wracked by turmoil and confusion.
It is incredible that the German Reich, in wartime conditions, in the midst of a conflict that could not be won, found a way to set up the bureaucratic marvel and feat of engineering, social and technological,that systematically murdered over 6,000,000 people in three and a half years: that's 18,000 or more every single day.The logistics alone were staggering:imagine a workforce of over a hundred thousand persons in 15 countries, the coordination of train schedules, budgets, allocations, complicity or at least non-intervention of local populations, mass deceptions on a gigantic scale upon the populations of victims, mostly Jews, the invention of diabolical ways of killing off thousands in a few minutes at a cost of pennies per victim!
If the Final Solution was able to murder 18,000 persons a day, the Manhattan Project found a way to kill 200,000 in a few minutes! Once again we are dealing with a huge bureaucracy kept secret from the public and the world, one that was not composed of blood-thirsty lunatics, but consisted largely of brilliant, civilized, genial, thoughtful world class scientists, working in teams coordinated by politicians at the highest level,university presidents and science bureaucrats. Drawing on resources from the whole planet, at a time when basic necessities were being rationed, many millions of dollars were invested on new, untested technologies.A huge labor force was drafted into working in laboratories all across the United States, with major headquarters in Oak Ridge Tennessee; Los Alamos ,New Mexico ; Hanford, Washington;and universities like Colombia, Chicago, MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley.
One's mind reels, overwhelmed by awe,at the irrefutable evidence for the organizational potential inherent in promising the world another technology for destroying countless numbers of human lives - not capriciously, mind you, but in ways that are efficient, cost effective and safe (in the short run) for its promoters.
The Higgs Boson Bomb is the way to go. Once the requisite enthusiasm is generated, governments will be more than happy to go on investing billions of tax-payer euros in the search for a scientific phantom.Rulers and ruled will gladly wait 20, 30, 40 years for the development of computers to process all the data;none of this triage nonsense when so much is at stake!Not a word of complaint (save perhaps from those anarchist fanatics who are always trying to show how different they are) will be uttered by the populations of nations who will have to put up with ever so many delays, accidents, errors, false leads, massive rejection of worthless data, enormous loses,cost overruns, - not to mention the real possibility that there may,after all, be no boson at the end of the tunnel.
All that will be needed is a propaganda machine that will keep alive, will nourish, the dream of being able to kill everyone else and get away with it. If anyone is left to do the dreaming.
It's worth looking into it. Please join with me in composing a letter today to Jerzy Buzek, current president of the European Union.