Book Review: Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample
Review by Marissa Cevallos
By Science News
The only thing more elusive than the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that physicists built a $10 billion device to capture, is Peter Higgs himself.
The Scottish physicist first imagined 47 years ago that a new particle was needed to explain how other particles get their mass. Newspapers and TV stations have barraged Higgs with phone calls in recent years as particle accelerators get closer to finding the particle, but the retired professor ignores the ringing unless he’s expecting a call. He doesn’t bother with e-mail.
Massive has achieved the journalistic equivalent of capturing the particle: The story pins down how a young Higgs, disenchanted with the use of atomic physics for weapons, came to propose a new type of particle that solved a snafu in a theory on symmetries. The theoretical seed Higgs planted, which five other physicists independently derived in 1964 but without as much credit, steadily began to bear fruit as it was invoked to complete physicists’ “standard model” of particles and forces.