Peter Higgs on knowledge, immortality and the future of physics – New Scientist

Peter Higgs picks up the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 medal

Phil McCarthy/Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851

By Richard Webb

Youre in London to receive the 1851 Royal Commission medal for outstanding influence on science. Arent you bored of medals and prizes by now? I think I shall have to clear some handkerchiefs and things out of another drawer to find room. There are quite a lot.

How does it feel to have achieved immortality? I describe it as notoriety rather than immortality. It continues to be an embarrassment how easily I get recognised on the streets of Edinburgh going to do my shopping. Theres always somebody who wants to take a selfie or something. Its nice but theres too much of it.

Many people thought the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERNs Large Hadron Collider would be just the start, yet five years on nothing more has been discovered. Yes, thats rather worrying. The hope has been that we would discover things to connect particle physics much more with cosmology, dark matter and that kind of thing. It doesnt seem to be happening yet.

Youre thinking of theories that go beyond the standard model that the Higgs is a component of, like supersymmetry? Yes, supersymmetry in particular. Quite apart from its potential to explain dark matter, from a pure theorists point of view its hard to see how to make the connection between particle physics and gravity in any other way.

Isnt finding the Higgs and nothing else the very worst of outcomes? It would still have been worse if theyd found nothing. The standard model is so successful in other ways that a non-discovery would have been really rather shattering.

Do you still feel a hint of embarrassment referring to the particle as the Higgs? It could be worse: when its called the god particle that really upsets people. That seems to me an unfortunate mixing of theoretical physics with bad theology. Ive ceased to be embarrassed about the particle being named after me because Ive spent many years playing down the tendency to attach my name to everything in the theory. But its upsetting for people who worked on the theory even before me to have my name on what they did.

How can fundamental physics get out of its current impasse? There are plenty of indications of the need to go beyond the standard model, but not necessarily through the sort of thing they do at CERN. The discoveries in neutrino physics about neutrino oscillations dont fit well at all. And people are beginning to learn more about ancient galaxies and so on, which throws some light on the question of whether dark matter exists or whether youve got to modify gravity. I think we have to watch the astrophysical evidence coming in.

A lot of people would ask why we should bother trying to discover new physics. What would you say to that? The person who answered that was Robert Wilson, the builder of the machine at Fermilab when he testified before US Congress in 1969. He simply said, this is one of the things that makes this country worth defending. I think theres a general tendency now for people to devalue pure science and concentrate on the spin-offs. Its a mistake. Its giving in to the idea that pure science doesnt really matter unless you can get something tangible out of it.

What was your motivation for becoming a theoretical physicist? The seed was probably planted when I was at school in Bristol during the second world war. One of its former students, whose name appeared on the honours board, was Paul Dirac. He was about as pure a theoretical physicist as you could get, maybe overly pure. It was curiosity about him that began to draw me in aided by my incompetence as an experimentalist in my student days at Kings College London.

What would your advice be to someone who has your sort of esoteric interests? Go undercover. I wasnt productive in an obvious way; I didnt churn out papers. I think these days the University of Edinburgh would have sacked me long ago, theres just too much competition. So now I would say, do it in your spare time, and get yourself a solid publication record in the sort of thing that gets you recognition more readily.

Have we lost sight as a society of the value of knowledge for knowledges sake? Theres certainly a danger that people in government circles are losing sight of it. With various economic crises and problems hitting us, particularly things that may be self-inflicted, its hard to argue the case.

Do you mean things like Brexit? If the UK does get out of the European Union, as we seem to be doing, theres going to be a very great upheaval because more and more of the funding for scientific research in this country has come from Europe. The people who want to get us out are going to have to reverse that process in some way and they wont find it easy to do. I dont think I would be very happy in the US either with the Trump regime, with attitudes that will affect science. But the trend towards being anti-rationalist affects more than just science itself, and it is worrying.

So how do we make the case for expertise and knowledge for knowledges sake? Perhaps from watching the mess that some of the non-experts make of things.

Peter Higgs is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In 1964, along with Robert Brout and Franois Englert at the Free University of Brussels, he proposed a new particle that would explain how other fundamental particles gain mass. The discovery of the Higgs boson, announced in July 2012, led to the award of the 2013 Nobel prize in physics to Higgs and Englert.

Read more: Instant Expert: The Higgs Boson; The Higgs boson makes the universe stable just. Coincidence?

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Peter Higgs on knowledge, immortality and the future of physics - New Scientist