John Stewart Bell and Twentieth-Century Physics: Vision and Integrity by Andrew Whitaker

Author:Andrew Whitaker [Whitaker, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Physics, Quantum Theory, General, Atomic & Molecular, Philosophy & Social Aspects, History
ISBN: 9780191060694
Google: IzxRDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-07-07T15:04:56.568574+00:00

Figure 3.15 François Englert; from Martinus Veltman, Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics (World Scientific, Singapore, 1993). © CERN.

Higgs himself was as embarrassed as anybody that only his name was commonly associated with the discovery. He has said that he would prefer the term ‘Higgs mechanism’ to be replaced by ‘the ABEGHHK’tH mechanism’, a name which includes the initials of the surnames of those mentioned above, as well as that of Philip Anderson, at the beginning of the list, and ’t Hooft, at the end [94]. It has also been said that Higgs would have liked Kibble to have been a third name on the Nobel Prize citation.

Anderson was present because he was a highly renowned solid state physicist who had carried out extremely important work in the fields of magnetism, superconductivity (the fact that the electrical resistance of certain materials drops to zero below a particular temperature), and disordered solids (which do not have a crystal structure); in 1977 he was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics. Anderson drew the attention of his colleagues, who were working on the physics of elementary particles, to the phenomenon, well known in the theory of solids, of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

The most obvious example of this phenomenon occurs in ferromagnetism—usually just called magnetism by non-physicists—where, below a certain temperature called the Curie temperature (named after Pierre rather than Marie Curie), a material such as iron may have a permanent magnetism along a particular direction. The formula for the energy of the system does not pick out a unique direction; rather, although there is symmetry between many directions in space, below the Curie temperature this symmetry is spontaneously broken. Anderson suggested that this idea could be useful in the study of weak interactions.

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