Higgs Boson Archivi - Gingko Edizioni

Guido Tonelli, born in 1950 in a small village perched in the mountains of Massa Carrara, is the author of an extraordinary book: The imperfect birth of things. The great race to discover God’s particle and the new physics which will change the World (La Nascita Imperfetta delle cose. La grande corsa alla particella di Dio e la nuova fisica che cambierà il mondo. Rizzoli, Milano, 2016).

Tonelli teaches Physics at the University of Pisa and besides being the recipient of several prestigious prizes – the Fundamental Physics Prize, the Enrico Fermi Prize and the medal from the President of Italy – was the leader of the team of scientists who discovered the Higgs boson at the CERN of Geneva, on the 8th of October, 2013. François Englert e Peter Higgs then received the Nobel Prize for Physics that year for their intuition. I met Guido Tonelli, together with his colleague and my fellow ‘turbighese’ Massimo Caccia, Franco Bedeschi and Catia Milardi – all brilliant physicists – in Hong Kong, just before the publication of his book and I was struck by his debonair politeness and good humor. Guido is the kind of person you would love to have as your neighbor, certainly he doesn’t look like an introvert Faustian character.

The research on the Higgs boson gathered speed at the CERN, in 1995, after a casual encounter between Tonelli and the Nobel Prize recipient Carlo Rubbia, formerly a CERN director, at the cafeteria of the center. Rubbia was curious about the program carried forward by Tonelli, Michel Della Negra and Jim Virdee and then invited him into his office to explain clearly what was cooking in the pot. Tonelli accepted the challenge, expecting a hellish hour with him, because of the well-known aggressive, take-no-prisoners, character of Rubbia. He was unable to convince him, as he concluded: “It will never work. You will create a huge hole in the water”. Later events demonstrated that, well, even Nobel Prize recipients may be wrong!

In 2008 the Lhc (Large hadron collider) was going to be switched on and a sort of mass hysteria took over the world (I was one of those people creating it – with a fiction, as well as anti-scientific, novel in the style of Angels & Demons – which was released in those days by Mursia of Milan) and, also because of it, Guido Tonelli received threatening emails. For that I am sorry but my humble opinion had always been that science is scientific only in men’s eyes not in absolute terms, and I love science-fiction novels of all kinds.

Tonelli writes that:

In the opinion of those people – A tiny black hole would be created during the first collisions and nobody will detect it. The small hungry monster will then swallow up all the matter and for a week nothing will happen, then, all in a sudden, with the increase of its mass the entire planet in a split second will be swallowed up, with lightings of a Biblical Armageddon -; In a normal world, no one would have taken them seriously, but the information society in which we live in, normal it is not.

Well, this represents a tidy sum up of my science-fiction novel, Black Hole…

The episode narrated by Tonelli in his book which I love most, because of its pathos, is presented under the title of ‘False alarms or epochal discoveries?’.
I remember to have read about it on the Washington Post while on holiday in Thailand with my wife, during the Easter of 2011.
Far away, Guido Tonelli and his family were packing for a long-scheduled holiday to Nice, France, after spending Christmas working at the CERN. But the well-deserved holiday was not going to materialize: he opened his email box and found hundreds of unexpected and unwelcomed messages, then journalists called asking for his comments, since all the papers of the world were already carrying articles about the discovery of the Higgs at the Atlas. The Lhc was divided in two experiments: Atlas and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), a general-purpose detector, headed by Tonelli. Although it has the same scientific goals as the ATLAS experiment, the CMS used different technical solutions and a different magnet-system design.
Guido Tonelli was forced to tell his wife that there will be no holidays and they had to unpack: just because somebody at the Atlas had let the cat out of the bag.
The leak had come from a group of researchers from Wisconsin, headed by the Hongkonghese Sau Lan Wu, a capable and expert lady who had been a child prodigy: born in Hong Kong into a very poor family, she had won a prestigious scholarship solely because of her genius and incredible capacity to work and study hard. As a young researcher, she had been part of the team which discovered the Quark Charm with Sam Ting.
Like other researchers at the CERN she was convinced that some faint signals coming from the 115 GeV in the old machine were indication of the Higgs boson. She then based her elaborations on those signals to detect the Higgs. But as wise men say: “Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything”.
The problem was essentially that she did not submit her findings to an independent panel for verification, a common scientific procedure, somehow compulsory for such large cooperation. Suddenly the result went public and the bomb exploded.
At the CERN all the researchers jumped into action to see if really the Higgs is really decaying into two photons, as San Lau thought.
Vivek Sharma was recalled from San Diego and put to work, but then the cold shower came: on 25 April Fabiola Gianotti told the press that there were no Higgs there.
Guido Tonelli says that to be extra sure he went on with his facts-checking, ignoring the official version by Fabiola, thinking: what if San Lau is right and we are all wrong? But soon after he reached the same conclusion: San Lau had made a horrible mistake during her Easter Bump as it will become known.
They were all angry and nervous but then Sau Lan one evening came knocking at Guido Tonelli’s office, sat down in front of him and, while crying, she said she was sorry for her mistake.
Guido in turn felt sorry for her and told her to look forward not backward, knowing well that she will have to pay dearly for her mistake within the unforgiving scientific community.

I am writing this review in English and not in Italian because I think that this book should be translated and made available to the English speaking world. It is a great work, deserving more credit. The author takes the reader through the complex world of particle physics, mixing it with his personal life, while explaining complex concepts using plain words. It is an important book that all people interested in science and its influence on modern society should not miss.

In March 2015 the Lhc (Large Hadron Collider) will be switched on again after a great upgrade. Having discovered the Higgs Boson (improperly nicknamed God’s particle) now all the top theoretical physicists will concentrate on this Tower of Babel of a machine to look into the Susy phenomenon concerning super symmetry.
Just a few physicists claim that the elusive Higgs bosons may not have been discovered at all. Their discovery was announced 2 years ago: with a Nobel Prize, awarded to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for their work on the theory of the Higgs boson.
Some researchers at the University of Southern Denmark’s Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology still dispute that while the Cern scientists did discover unique new particles, there’s no conclusive evidence of them being the Higgs bosons, as other particles could have created the same results.
“The current data is not precise enough to determine exactly what the particle is,” says university researcher Mads Toudal Frandsen. “It could be a number of other known particles.”

More study will be needed in the future even if we should add that the opinion of Dr. Frandsen is not taken seriously by the greatest part of his peers.

In 2008 I did publish with Mursia of Milan a work of science fiction, the title was Black Hole and it went out with some acclaim. Then the Lhc was damaged and it did stop for one year. Even if the book was released far too late the first edition sold in a month.

My book was based on the assumption that LHC getting at full power might destroy our planed by creating a microscopic black hole. Then the LHC was restarted and the Higgs Bosons were discovered and soon after it was halted again to carry out all the works indispensable to increase its smashing power to levels never seen before in the universe, a work which has now been completed. Will the Lhc destroy our planet and ourselves?
We don’t know, and we’ll not know even if that will really happen, because the Earth will evolve in a speck of dust in a fraction of a second: no cry, no agony, no desperation…we’ll all find ourselves in the other dimension we call the hereafter. That could be the Apocalypse of the Bible (ancient Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apocálypsis, from ἀπό and καλύπτω meaning “uncovering” that is a disclosure of knowledge) and that was indeed that was the very end in my science fiction book.
Just a few months ago the greatest living physicist, Professor Stephen Hawking, reported claims which could be see similar to what I wrote in my book which, I repeat, was based only on fantasy, intuition and some superficial researches.

Here is what Hawking has declared to the Daily Mail:

The elusive ‘God particle’ discovered by scientists in 2012 has the potential to destroy the universe, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.
At very high energy levels, the Higgs boson could cause space and time suddenly collapse – and ‘we wouldn’t see it coming’, the former Cambridge professor of mathematics says.
The God particle, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could cause a ‘catastrophic vacuum delay’ if scientists were to put it under extreme stress.
The God Particle could destabilise at high energy, threatening the universe, but the Cern particle accelerator is too slow to cause such a problem.
A disaster like this is very unlikely for the time being as physicists do not have a particle accelerator large enough create such an experiment, but Prof Hawking’s comments have excited scientists, the Sunday Times reported.
The theoretical physicist wrote his thoughts on the Higgs boson in the preface to a new book, Starmus, a collection of lectures by scientists and astronomers including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Queen guitarist Brian May.
Prof Hawking wrote: ‘The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV).
‘This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light.
‘This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.’

WHAT IS THE GOD PARTICLE?
The Higgs boson was a key missing piece in the jigsaw for physicists in trying to understand how the universe works.
Scientists believe that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe, an invisible energy field, called the Higgs field, formed.
This has been described as a kind of ‘cosmic treacle’ across the universe. As particles passed through it, they picked up mass, giving them size and shape and allowing them to form the atoms that make up you, everything around you and everything in the universe.
This was the theory proposed in 1964 by former grammar school boy Professor Higgs that has now been confirmed.
Without the Higgs field particles would simply whizz around space in the same way as light does.
A boson is a type of sub-atomic particle. Every energy field has a specific particle that governs its interaction with what’s around it.
The professor did add sarcastically, however, that such an event is unlikely in the near future.
He said: ‘A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.’
Professor John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at Cern, said: ‘One thing should be made clear. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) did not cause this problem, and collisions at the LHC could not trigger the instability, because their energies are far too low.’
Particle accelerators make subatomic particles travel at greater and greater speeds as they are pumped with more energy before smashing them together.
Scientists do this to try and spot tiny fragments of particles which fly off, and it is how the Higgs boson was discovered at the Cern LHC in Switzerland in 2012.
In that experiment, physicists noticed unexpected debris from the collisions that fitted with what British scientist Peter Higgs had predicted in the early 1960s.
The Higgs boson particle is thought to be part of the mechanism that gives matter its mass, but scientists do not fully understand it yet.

A book by Guido Tonelli about the hunt of the Higgs Boson.

Babel’s Tower is ready and is the Apocalypse near?