Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics

by Jon Butterworth, Lisa Randall (Foreword)

Now in paperback: the “vivid account of what the process of discovery was really like for an insider.”—Peter Higgs
 
Particle physics as we know it depends on the Higgs boson: It’s the missing link between the birth of our universe—as a sea of tiny, massless particles—and the tangible world we live in today. But for more than 50 years, scientists wondered: Does it exist?
 
Physicist Jon Butterworth was at the frontlines of the hunt for the Higgs at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider—perhaps the most ambitious experiment in history. In Most Wanted Particle, he gives us the first inside account of that uncertain time, when an entire field hinged on a single particle, and life at the cutting edge of science meant media scrutiny, late-night pub debates, dispiriting false starts in the face of intense pressure, and countless hours at the collider itself. As Butterworth explains, our first glimpse of the elusive Higgs brings us a giant step closer to understanding the universe—and points the way to an entirely new kind of physics.

Genres: Science, Physics, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Popular Science, History, Chemistry

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2014

About the author

Jon Butterworth is a physics professor at University College London, and a member of the Atlas experiment at Cern's Large Hadron Collider.

He also writes for various places including The Guardian, Aeon and Cosmic Shambles.
Links to that and more, including news about public appearances, corrections and comments on his books, and other information can be found here.

Reviews

[Ram · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an amazing book on the journey leading up to the discovery of the Higgs boson. I have always been fascinated by Physics and have eagerly followed (or tried to, with my limited understanding!) the developments in particle physics theories and the experimental results. The search for the Higgs boson has been in the works for a long time, but the interest levels accelerated since the opening of the Large Hadron Collider in 2009. Jon Butterworth is an experimental scientist who has been associated with the collider and its search from the start, so in this fascinating book he takes us on the journey leading to the culmination of the search and the formal announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson in the summer of 2012.

The book provides a view of the theory & data that existed prior to the LHC’s commissioning, then a step by step and ringside view of the progress made between 2010 and 2012. Along this journey, Jon describes the theories and the experiments using (close to) layman terms & analogies where possible. I will not claim that I followed every word and every aspect of the sub-atomic world of hadrons, fermions, quarks, matter and anti-matter, QCD & QED, etc but at a broad level it is hard not to get a small feel for the sense of excitement that the author tries to convey. Even for someone who is not a hard-core physics person, this book should be a fascinating read – some of the sections may be a bit “heavy” – but if one persists and refers to offline (or online) content referred in the book, it is possible to get a glimpse of the incredibly complex science behind this discovery.

One of the criticisms of this book is the amount of personal narrative that the author has put in – space that could’ve been filled up with science – but I view that as a way for readers – lay readers – to connect with the human persona of the scientists who are engaged at the cutting edge of high-energy physics research. In that, this book does a wonderful job.

Also, one book is never enough to understand the continuous search for new physics. Theories abound so every such book is a step towards establishing a better and clearer picture in our minds. Again, in that direction, this book is a fantastic view of what the LHC did and why it did what it did.

Smashing Physics is a well-deserved contender for the Science Book award from the Royal Society’s Winton Prize for books on science. That alone is a good reason to buy and read this book.

https://theprintedword.wordpress.com/...

[Davide Nole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jon, il caro Jon, spiega benissimo tutto quello cheha portato alla scoperta del bosone di Higgs. Per una volta, il fulcro è sul lavoro sperimentale, e non solo su quanto il povero Peter (Higgs) e gli altri teorici aspettassero questa scoperta.
Nel caso vogliate farvi un'idea di quanto lavoro ci sia voluto, questo libro è probabilmente il migliore sussidio. Non sono chiaramente necessarie conoscenze pregresse in nessun campo scientifico.

[Daniel Farabaugh · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book had two problems. On the one hand, the science was hard to follow. I understand that it is a difficult subject for the layman but if you are going to write a nonacademic work about a subject it is incumbent on the author too make it accessible. I am pretty well versed in this science for a layman and I could not follow parts of this work.

Secondly, a lot of the book boiled down to descriptions of committee meetings. Just not really an interesting topic.

[Chirayu Batra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as interesting as I expected. There was undoubtedly a lot of physics, so for someone with no background in physics, it will be a nightmare. Also as the journey explained by Jon involved himself as well, there were bits and parts of biography in the book. That is perfectly ok, but there is thin line between writing about your work and self adulation, I think that became too thin.

Will write detailed review soon.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining personal account that doesn't hold back on the physics. Recommended.

[M. Azhaari Shah Sulaiman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The inside of story of the hunt for the Higgs boson by the hundreds of Physicians working in Large Hadron Collider for the sole mission of making one of the most eminent scientific breakthrough of the 21 century, the Higgs boson or the Higgs particle. A particle much much smaller than that of an electron and how it will change the world as we know of today.

Despite all the scientifical jargons and technical terms, the writer is quite good at humor. Making this writing less boring, less exhausting, less hectic journey.

[Rodney Harvill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most physics-related books on the market are written by theoretical physicists, many of whose ideas, such as string theory or multiverses, are not really testable with current or foreseeable technology. This book, on the other hand, is written by an experimental physicist with the ATLAS experiment associated with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In the world of the theoretical physicist, when testability is not a viable option, mathematical elegance becomes a success criterion. The world of the experimental physicist, however, centers around statistical analysis of measured data. Does what he is seeing correspond with an already known phenomenon? If not, is it real or a measurement anomaly? Can it be reproduced in another facility? If it is real, does it correspond with something predicted by theoretical physicists, or is it a phenomenon unanticipated by the theorists, phenomenon that by serendipitous coincidence produces particle and energy results similar to what was predicted. This uncertainty is reflected in this book, which closes with the announcement of the discovery of something. The press, with little to no capacity for nuance, had trumpeted it as confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson. Yet, much more work would be needed to confirm whether the discovery was the Higgs boson or some other particle.

I found this book fascinating, for it was a glimpse into the world of experimental physics, with its concerns, frustrations and uncertainties. When I was an undergraduate nuclear engineering student at the University of Tennessee, I took a part-time contract position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to support some close-out research and development of the Advanced Neutron Source, a research reactor that had recently been canceled in the design stage. It was to have plate fuel, with thin cooling channels between the plates. Once concern was the potential for debris to be wedged up against the entrance to a cooling channel, partially blocking it. How extensive would the cooling flow disruption be immediately downstream of the partial blockage. Models using FLUENT, a computational fluid dynamics code, had predicted certain disruption patterns, but a test facility reproducing a single cooling channel and measuring the flow patterns with a 2D laser doppler velocimetry unit was predicting a less extensive disruption pattern. Additional testing would be required, and I was tasked with performing those tests. At some point, the research engineer supervising me and I discovered that the measured results were sensitive to how tight the bolts were that were holding the blockage insert in place. It they were too tight, the test channel would slightly bow, producing a small gap between the end of the blockage and the test channel wall, a gap through which a small amount of water could flow into the middle of the flow disruption resulting from the blockage. With this new knowledge, we were soon replicating the FLUENT predictions. The next spring, when I did a presentation on this at an American Nuclear Society student conference, a professor pointed out that I was placing too much emphasis on making the experimental results line up with theory. The issues described in this book reminded me of those experiences and that caution.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty decent narrative science story of the LHC's search for the Higgs boson. Butterworth does a good job explaining how this kind of physics works, and what the many experimentalists are all doing. There are pleasant anecdotes from his own life—although I'm not entirely sure what his job was—and he goes into more detail than most writers would dare. Lots of long digressions into other areas of physics. The casual style works. I can't say I understood or will remember all these details, and I can't tell if Butterworth himself understands them all, but I appreciated the effort.

> It is very important not to use up your best collaboration name on the first proposal, since you will almost certainly have to merge with some other proposal and therefore have to pick a new name at some point. I can only presume CMS made this mistake.

> In the simulated data, the pulse had come out in order of wire number, 1–8. In the real data they came out in order of arrival time, which depended on where the particle was! Once we took it into account properly, all the crazy numbers lined up again.

> Back at ZEUS, I nervously tapped the shift leader on the shoulder and showed him the reading. The effect was dramatic. He leapt out of the room, ran up the stairs and pressed the emergency power cut-off for the entire rucksack. They had turned off the cooling water but not the electronics. A few more minutes and the delicate, expensive electronics, the product of years of work, would have fried.

> it takes a lot of energy to make a W or a Z, and even when you have one, it will very rapidly decay to other particles, meaning the weak force is short-range and, indeed, weak

> Experimentalists get ignored if they are right (e.g. about the speed of neutrinos), and hugely cited if they are wrong. Theorists are ignored if they are wrong, but get a Nobel Prize if they are right.

> even though the protons have an energy of 4000 GeV each (so a total energy of 8000 GeV available), any given quark or gluon only carries a fraction of the full energy of the proton, so the available energy to make new particles is generally a factor of five or ten lower than the proton energy might indicate.

> Given the time zones involved, it would be possible to spend every hour of every European working day, and most of the night, in an ATLAS meeting. Since they are nearly all available via some form of teleconference, with enough connections you could spend most of the day in half a dozen of them at the same time. This would of course melt your brain. To add insult to injury, a curious phenomenon has emerged. The moment a meeting begins to get interesting, one of the participants (usually the chair) will almost invariably suggest they ‘take it offline’. And we move on to the next topic.

> there are ideas to collide muons. These are heavy versions of electrons, so they have all the advantages of electrons but much less synchrotron radiation (1.6 billion times less, since they are 200 times heavier than electrons). One problem here is they decay in 2.2 microseconds

There are a few inaccuracies, in his descriptions of quantum physics and statistics, but nothing too serious.

> … these constraints told us that if the Standard Model Higgs boson existed, there was a 95 per cent chance that its mass lay between 42 and 159 GeV.

[Rebekah]

The discovery of the laws that describe what is going on inside atoms has been one of science's greatest triumphs. It was achieved with remarkable speed, subatomic science having begun little more than a century ago as an academic backwater and developed into a quintessential example of "big science".

The first subatomic particle, the electron, was discovered by the Cambridge physicist JJ Thomson in 1897 using desktop apparatus that cost only a few thousand pounds at today's prices. Few people in the outside world knew what he had done, and still fewer cared. It was a very different story in July 2012, when scientists at the Cern laboratory in Switzerland announced their discovery of the latest subatomic particle to show its face, a so-called "Higgs boson" or "Higgs particle", named after the Edinburgh University theoretician Peter Higgs. The total cost this time was a few billion pounds.

This was good value, as Jon Butterworth implicitly argues in Smashing Physics, a delightful account of his life as a Cern experimentalist, based at University College London. He explains why he and his colleagues are so curious about the subatomic world, and gives a vivid glimpse of life on a huge international project in modern experimental particle physics. In the course of the book, we accompany him to Cern, to quite a few meetings, to an interview with John Humphrys and to conferences all over the world.

Butterworth begins with a brisk account of the standard model, which describes the fundamental interactions that govern the inner workings of atoms, though not gravity (the effects of which are negligible on the atomic scale). The Higgs particle was the model's only missing piece for a long time, and it was crucial to know whether it existed as it was expected to be a clear manifestation of the mechanism that explains why some fundamental particles have mass and are not as insubstantial as light. The theoreticians made several predictions about the Higgs and its behaviour, but its own mass was a mystery, making life exceptionally difficult for the experimenters trying to hunt it down.

To find the Higgs – or to rule out its existence – was one of the aims of the Large Hadron Collider, a huge machine that accelerates protons (sub-nuclear particles) to within a squillionth of the speed of light before smashing them together (hence the book's title). If the particle existed, it should have quickly fallen apart into other particles in ways that experimenters could study. This is much easier said than done: as Butterworth explains, it was always going to be extremely difficult to pin down the particle, as the evidence was expected to be largely – but not completely – obscured by huge numbers of tracks due to other subatomic processes. Several months after the collider was switched on, there was no clear sign of the particle, leading some theoreticians to get cold feet and even to doubt its existence.

Butterworth tells the story of how the particle was eventually tracked down, making clear the extent of the challenge. He is an engaging guide, generous to all his colleagues, especially in the media – "We should be more forgiving of some of the excitable headlines" – but is sometimes a tad harsh on theoreticians. "Experimentalists get ignored if they are right … and hugely cited if they are wrong," he writes, whereas "Theorists are ignored if they are wrong, but get a Nobel prize if they are right." In my experience, theorists soon find themselves on the scrapheap if they are trivial, let alone wrong.

It is hard to come up with truly innovative ideas that are not ruled out by combining the two great underpinning theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, and by the experimental data that support them. Yet it is plain that the standard model will not be the last word on subatomic physics – we need a better-understood, more comprehensive theory that can describe all the fundamental forces, including gravity. The only viable candidate for this is string theory, which has huge potential but "struggles to predict anything remotely measurable", as Butterworth puts it. He is one of many who disparage the theory, though I suspect he and his fellow sceptics will be proved wrong in the long term and that physicists will one day reap the benefits of the work now being done on string theory, even if it is superseded by another approach.

Like all good experimenters, Butterworth keeps his feet firmly on the ground. He was a "confirmed Higgs sceptic" until the closing weeks of 2011, but, after seeing a new display of data a few weeks later, he changed his mind – "I knew in my guts we had it." It is fascinating to read how the particle's existence was eventually demonstrated using a tiny proportion of telltale tracks in the detectors. Butterworth describes the problems he and his colleagues encountered as they repeatedly checked their analyses to avoid any possibility of career-ending mistakes. Only when the discovery of a new particle was beyond reasonable doubt did the Cern authorities announce it, triggering worldwide media "Higgsteria".

The discovery led to the sharing of last year's Nobel prize for physics by Higgs and his fellow pioneer François Englert. They certainly deserved it, but, as Butterworth says, it is a pity that the experimenters who actually proved the theoreticians were right have not yet had a share of the Nobel glory. I, for one, hope that the experimentalists – or, at least, Cern – will be rewarded with Nobel honours after they have made another exciting discovery, preferably one that the theoreticians did not expect. Theoreticians have been calling the tune in particle physics for too long.

In a bravura passage towards the end of his book, Butterworth extols the virtues of this kind of research and bewails the attempts by some bureaucrats to guess its impact on society in advance. The point of doing fundamental particle physics is – like great art – not specifically to improve our material wellbeing, but to enrich our understanding and appreciation of our place in the world. The spinoffs – including Cern's invention of the world wide web (Tim Berners-Lee was a scientist there) – are a bonus. All in all, it is plain that the UK gets excellent value from its support of this basic science, at an annual cost to each of us of a fancy cappuccino.

When reading Smashing Physics, I found myself reflecting on how much the world of subatomic physics has changed since its earliest days. Butterworth shows that the conventional image of experimenters working alone in a laboratory has long been superseded by huge international teams, in which individuals struggle to make their mark. Butterworth himself comes across as both a team player and a gifted individual, capable of doing first-class research; he is also a first-rate populariser. This rare talent is handsomely on display in this charming, enlightening bulletin from one of the most exciting fields of human endeavour.

[Andrei Scurei · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a great book that combines a lot of theory with short stories about the author's life experiences, some quite funny and entertaining. This probably helps you go through the drier sections. I admit I often got lost and confused just in the number of particle types mentioned and used, and it becomes a bit hard to follow especially in an audiobook. Still, I wouldn't change this, I liked the fact that the book is a bit of a mind stretch. It also covers a lot of aspects about working in a team, in a corporation or in a research lab, and things like politics and government spending on science. But it's mostly light-hearted so it's a very pleasant, educative book.

[Chris Esposo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent book on the operational enterprise of the LHC focused heavily on the work around the discovery of the Higgs. Probably a little over 1/4 of the text attempts to explain the importance of this or that particle and the mechanism that guides that behaviour, how one would detect it in the data etc., but if you are not already familiar with the particle zoo, it'll probably wash over without effect. The rest goes over history and a broad organizational analysis of the functioning of CERN. How experiments get prioritized, how progress is measured etc. The reader has a dry British accent, but definitely listenable on a walk or jog

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected more physics and less biography, I recently read “Atom Land” and found it a little elementary but still enjoyable. So I thought I would give this one a go. He seems very knowledgeable about particle physics and I greatly appreciate him taking his time to write these books. But, he never fails to boast about his involvement in any situation. It feels less about the Higgs boson discovery and more about the Jon Butterworth story. There is a difference between validating your credentials and unnecessarily bragging about your role in unrelated meetings, papers, lectures, projects and media coverage. And he comes across a bit too bumptious for me.

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always been obsessed w space and it used to be a dream to work at CERN so when I saw this book I knew I had to read it. Some of the science stuff went over my head cos this was very in depth, but listening to it as an audiobook definitely helped. I think Jon Butterworth did a really good job at giving a comprehensive history of the search for the Higgs and I liked his writing style. Liked the fact this was physics book but didn't just recycle the same stuff other books do and I recommend for anyone who's interested in particle physics and CERN etc.

Took a break from listening to this during quarantine cos life got away from me but I'm glad I carried on.

4/5 stars.

[Midahed · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm fascinated by all things science and engineering, particularly physics and astronomy but, sadly, I was disappointed by this book. It's really not written for the layman. There are long sections (whole chapters) that sound like they once formed the basis of lectures for final-year physics undergraduates, if not post-grads. I would recommend reading the Wiki entries for the Standard Model and Supersymmetry. This will give you a flavour of the level of technical description that you can expect in this book. This is not like watching one of the TV programmes featuring Professor Brian Cox - those are very accessible to the layman, whereas this book is not.

[Elgin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book I have read on the search for the Higgs boson. Jon Butterworth does an excellent job in describing many aspects of the work towards the discovery. He especially devotes effort towards explaining much of the physics...I cannot claim to understand all he wrote (in spite of reading and rereading several passsages many times) but do feel I have a fair understanding of many aspects of the effort. But stepping back to the mid-twentieth century, it seems an imaginative tour-de-force to even ask the question "why is there mass? what causes it?") This inspires another question "why is there anything at all?"

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book about the history and the work done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
By no stretch of the imagination is this an easy book to read (the previous owner of my second hand copy seemed to give up at page 16). However, if you are up for it, this book will give a good basic knowledge about modern models of quantum theory. It's also surprisingly witty in places.
If you are really interested in the work at the LHC, this is about as good a book as you can read on the subject.
A reasonable knowledge of Relativity and spectroscopy is also very useful.

[Ean Sautebin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review is kind of similar to some other ones, by the way. For the most part, it's a good book and I enjoyed it, but there's a couple of things I didn't like. Like others have mentioned, the actual physics/science-y aspects of it are somewhat hard to follow for beginners in the topic. Also, if you're thinking this is a book all about physics/particle physics, it's not. It has elements of that, but a lot of history and personal storytelling are incorporated in the book as well. Overall, pretty decent book.

[Norjak · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of the events, people and experiments in the LHC for demonstrating the existence of the Higgs field/boson. If you are not as familiar with the associated quantum mechanics, I would suggest a read through over a listen on audio-book - the small divestitures into the physics typically required more attention/concentration to grasp the concept than my usual audio books. I expect it would have been more useful to see the equations and interactions in print.

[Gordon Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good account giving a sense of the challenges and the definition of proof that the scientific method can produce. It delves quite deeply at times into the issues being studied and, not being an expert, I let some of it wash over while getting the broad strokes of the explanations. There's a fair amount of commentary, social and political, on the scientific endeavour which is not out of place and is reasonably well done.

[Nelson Noven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love inside stories at CERN, maybe because I'm jealous of all the people who get to work there. This one so far has been my favorite. Butterworth takes away some of the glamour of being a scientist, and indeed being a CERN scientist--having to stand just outside the door of an important lecture/announcement, for example.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great Insider Persoective

While the jargon of theoretical physics was a challenge, the author make is very approachable. It looks at all the issues, politics and ultimate success of the LHC at CERN. It’s a glimpse at something extraordinary and shows the sheer amount of people working to try to push the limits of understanding.

[Timo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a somewhat interesting book, but it's a mix of a history of high energy physics, especially about the LHC and the search for the higgs boson, a quantum physics lesson, and a memoir. There are so many random personal stories that seemed out of place. I guess it is at least a decent view into the life of a prominent physicist.

[Katia Urquiza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened to this while traveling in Switzerland visiting family and then seeing CERN. Jon's style suited me and the way I read this book, though I imagine not everyone will like the anecdotes. His jovial personality and contagious enthusiasm for research mix well with his full description of the CERN adventure.

[Petr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A particle physics walk-through for wide range of interested readers. I could not follow some of the parts as I am just a layman in physics but nevertheless I was able to enjoy the story of finding Higgs boson.

[Shreya · Rating 4 out of 5]

(not the kindle edition)
this book was something i really treasured when i was certain i wanted to study physics. even after having changed my mind, upon reflection, it revived in me a desperate sort of curiosity about the universe.

[Tom Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lucid and entertaining account of the first few years of data taking at CERN's ATLAS experiment. He spins a very good yarn, with a conversational tone that makes it very readable, if at times a little meandering (which I didn't begrudge him at all given the ground covered).

[Patrick Ritchie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining read about the large Hadron collider, and I am now much more familiar with the standard model.

[Geraldine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book though much of it was over my head.

[Adom Frempong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind-blowing! Butterworth lays the topic down from first principles.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting personal story with good explanations for a technical topic I'll probably never fully understand. Some good British humor and storytelling though mixed in.