[HN Gopher] How the Higgs Boson Ruined Peter Higgs's Life
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How the Higgs Boson Ruined Peter Higgs's Life
Author : pseudolus
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-07-01 10:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| tchvil wrote:
| In my street, it is Francois Englert (or Robert Brout having the
| intuition) who found it first. Because his daughter was living in
| front of my house. And I'm still wondering why Higgs won the
| name.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| https://wikiless.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy?lang=en
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| Along the lines of "I won a $100 million dollars and it ruined my
| life"...
|
| Basically one does not value money, fame, beauty, power etc. if
| you already have it in plenty. Take it away suddenly and then you
| will realise how much you were taking your cachet for granted.
| Hbruz0 wrote:
| Similarly, take anonymity, non-fame, low responsibilities away
| from your life suddenly and you'll realise how much you were
| taking it for granted.
| spicyusername wrote:
| A bit of clickbait.
|
| The article just says he liked solitude and after being out of
| the pubic eye fit _40 years_, the Nobel prize made him a public
| figure temporarily. Hardly life ruining.
| Angostura wrote:
| Hardly click bait - It's a direct reported quote from the man
| himself.
|
| > One of the biggest shocks I had when I was interviewing him
| was when he said the discovery of the boson "ruined [his]
| life." I thought, "How can it ruin your life when you have done
| some beautiful mathematics, and then it turns out you had
| mysteriously touched on the pulse of nature, and everything
| you've believed in has been shown to be correct, and you've won
| a Nobel Prize? How can these things amount to ruin?" He said,
| "My relatively peaceful existence was ending. My style is to
| work in isolation and occasionally have a bright idea." He is a
| very retiring person who was being thrust into the limelight.
| imranq wrote:
| I guess its called Stokholm syndrome for a reason :)
| klabb3 wrote:
| Yes, it refers to the hostage crisis of employees during a bank
| robbery in Stockholm in the 1970s.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norrmalmstorg_robbery
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Eventually (100+ years) he'll be the answer to a trivia question.
|
| I think a lot of people like modesty in a famous person. It's so
| different from the posers who _want_ to be famous and go slapping
| their names on everything.
|
| I would hope that someone like him would give some speeches, the
| audience would love him, and he'd get a warm glow for the rest of
| his life that "I did that!"
| mhh__ wrote:
| Considering Higgs barely published anything for decades after
| ruination might not be so bad.
|
| That Nobel was a real shame in that the mechanism was discovered
| independently by multiple groups, but the prize only allows 3.
| Kibble had a real claim to it but probably missed out because it
| would've meant not rewarding his colleagues.
| temp1828472 wrote:
| The mechanism was discovered by Anderson. They had to give it
| to Higgs because otherwise people might realize that
| theoretical particle physicists don't do anything real (sorry
| but not sorry)
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| This person?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_W._Anderson
|
| " _From 1949 to 1984, Anderson was employed by Bell
| Laboratories in New Jersey, where he worked on a wide variety
| of problems in condensed matter physics.
|
| During this period he developed:
|
| - what is now called Anderson localization (the idea that
| extended states can be localized by the presence of disorder
| in a system)
|
| - Anderson's theorem (concerning impurity scattering in
| superconductors);
|
| - invented the Anderson Hamiltonian, which describes the
| site-wise interaction of electrons in a transition metal;
| proposed symmetry breaking within particle physics (this
| played a role in the development of the Standard Model and
| the development of the theory behind the Higgs mechanism,
| which in turn generates mass in some elementary particles);
|
| - created the pseudospin approach to the BCS theory of
| superconductivity;
|
| - made seminal studies of non-s-wave pairing (both symmetry-
| breaking and microscopic mechanism) in the superfluidity of
| He3,
|
| - and helped found the area of spin-glasses._"
| Maursault wrote:
| > Considering Higgs barely published anything for decades after
| ruination might not be so bad.
|
| I'd have never suspected that fame might be a correction to
| slow progress or discovery. I believe that, in general, fame is
| a solved problem, but the solution is not available to
| everyone. Why or how could a professor have an apparatus and
| plan and staff in place to deal with the challenges of fame?
| But I think it is a crying shame that just the detail of
| extreme popularity ruins the work. Even if Professor Higgs had
| already produced most of his work, as a species and society,
| everyone and everyone that comes after is hurt by denying him
| the ability to work and produce, and others before and after
| him. When will Beatlemania end? Why don't we, collectively,
| have restraint, have the ability? You'd think as a species by
| now we would have evolved some kind of completely invisible and
| odorless biochemical pheromonal response that tells all other
| humans, "leave me alone, I'm busy." Instead, it takes a staff.
| potiuper wrote:
| If its really an issue, then Higgs could ask for it be called
| some thing more descriptive such as the integral (spin) mass
| field/particle/mechanism.
| rob_c wrote:
| Please Americans so writing nonsense. He is retired, he gets the
| option to travel the world and speak since the Nobel (key point
| here if he chooses) and before then he was involved in own events
| by choice. He's donated a huge amount to charities which is a
| good thing, from what I understand there are few if any
| stipulations on the prize itself.
|
| Yes science bods keep annoying the retired old man, but most of
| us would let him browse a bookshop in peace. The physics dept
| handles the stuff dropped off for him and yes that wildly varies
| from the scribblings of new age nutters (I'm not joking, people
| think writing symbols from stones makes science) to people
| wanting to get a step ahead in the field, but none of that ends
| up at his door these days.
| kupopuffs wrote:
| Even he says it ruined his life. Am I misunderstanding your
| comment?
| rob_c wrote:
| He doesn't go to bed ruing the day as typically reported, but
| yes he dislikes that the other things he worked on within his
| professional career get overlooked by the small 1 page paper
| joining the dots on symmetry breaking.
|
| This reflection, albeit a candid one. Gets blown out of
| proportion media people (as with the article) are more
| obsessed with the 50 years of research and work that went
| into finding the damn thing to see if it actually existed. I
| don't think he tends to speak to crowds too much at his age,
| but his last few talks made it clear he has wider interests
| than the boson so when you ask him about it he wants to
| change the topic.
|
| Frankly the worst I can think of was some idiotic
| "scientific" press from the continent thought it was a great
| idea to doorstep him and his family shortly after everything
| died down, but now the press is over it he goes about it life
| mostly unchanged. A year or 2 of disruption for effectively a
| lottery sized winning isnt running someone's life.
| lokimedes wrote:
| After we discovered the particle in June 2012, there was a large
| summer conference in Stockholm (a good few months before the
| Nobel announcement). In the spirit of jubilation the Municipality
| had arranged a classical "Nobel" reception at the Mayor's Hall
| and banquet at the Vasa Museum in the evening.
|
| As a good friend of the chair of the organizing committee, I was
| asked to help that evening, collecting invitations as people
| entered. After greeting the first 100 or so, up came this elderly
| man who has lost his invitation. He was very sorry, and asked if
| there was any way for him to prove he in fact was invited. I told
| the gentleman, that he could have mine in case there was any
| trouble. As Peter Higgs was allowed to enter the little dress
| rehearsal for what was to befall him in autumn, there was a warm
| chuckle around us.
|
| I have met him on other occasions and perhaps it is exactly his
| non-selfish personality that has allowed the particle to carry
| his name in the first place. The rest of particle physics is
| luckily void of attributing eternal properties of nature to
| individuals.
| Qem wrote:
| >The rest of particle physics is luckily void of attributing
| eternal properties of nature to individuals.
|
| Physicists are blessed! Some fields are polluted with proper
| name derived jargon. Then learning anything is comparable to
| learn the phone book by rote. It sucks!
| agys wrote:
| But what about the units...?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| You recognized him, right? It was a little ambiguous from the
| prose
|
| Edit: You say "we discovered" so presumably obviously yes you
| had to lol
| lokimedes wrote:
| I did indeed :) it as his presumption that I didn't know who
| he was that made me connect with the OP's article.
| lalalandland wrote:
| FWIW Bosons are named after a person
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I wonder how bose-einstein condensates would taste. Forbidden
| ice cream?
| frutiger wrote:
| And of course fermions.
| frutiger wrote:
| And while Gell-Mann did not name them after himself, "three
| quarks for Muster Mark" is a delightful origin of that
| particle's name.
| wrycoder wrote:
| We started with up and down quarks, and then discovered the
| charmed and strange ones. It would have been appropriate,
| given the trend in quark naming, to call the next two gell
| and mann, but Feynman would have had a fit.
| Sharlin wrote:
| As are fermions, but not hadrons ("stout"), baryons
| ("heavy"), mesons ("intermediate"), or leptons ("thin",
| "fine").
| lokimedes wrote:
| You got me. But being a Fermion or a Boson is (IMO) a label
| for a generic property. and we have plenty of other such
| theoretical constructs named after the inventor: Weyl, Dirac,
| etc. we need language and labels to communicate ideas, so
| that is alight. But the Higgs particle and mechanism
| represents physical reality (now at least) which brings it to
| the level of electrons, quarks and the fundamental forces of
| nature. These names will stand for as long as our
| civilization. Who cares that someone predicted them a couple
| of years before their discovery when we are a century down
| the line. Just imagine if fire was known as the Peterson
| effect? Anyway that's just my opinion.
| mike_hock wrote:
| I question both the point and the well-definedness of this
| distinction between the concrete and the abstract. Does the
| Lorentz factor not "represent physical reality" and will it
| not also stand until the end of civilization?
|
| Why should a particle (almost) never be allowed to bear the
| name of its inventor, but an equation or a constant should?
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