Nobel Pursuit of the Higgs Boson

Yesterday the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Professor Peter Higgs from the University of Edinburgh and Professor François Englert from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. It was awarded for their work , in the 1960s, predicting the existence of the Higgs Boson. I’m not a physicist, so if you want to know what it is I like this description. Why is it important? Well, from what I understand, it’s our best explanation of why we weigh something (more accurately, have mass) but light doesn’t.

So, congratulations to Professors Higgs and Englert and, by extension, all those involved in developing the theory behind the Higgs Boson and subsequently finding it. David Willets MP, the UK Science Minster, recognised the work of literally thousands of scientists from around the world who have contributed to that effort. And, as I wrote about last year, it was a truly global effort.

Personally, I draw two lessons from the story of the Higgs Boson which are important in demonstrating the value of international science collaboration:

1. Great ideas can come from anywhere and it’s important to have ways to bring them to the attention of the right people. For example, Indian scientist S. N. Bose wrote a paper in the 1920s which revolutionised quantum statistics and laid the foundations for Higgs’s theory. But it was only the intervention of Einstein which led to this paper being published and widely read. Even the original work which proposed the Higgs Boson was being carried out, seemingly independently, in three different groups around the world. How many breakthroughs are missed or delayed because the right ideas aren’t shared widely enough and stay within one country or community? With the challenges the world faces, we can’t afford for the best ideas to go missing.
2. The discovery of the Higgs Boson is particularly elegant in that an experiment has borne out a theory which was put forwards almost 50 years before. It took that long partly because the experiments required were so huge, complex and expensive. It took a huge, international experiment at CERN (itself, an organisation with 20 member states) to find the Higgs Boson. Arguably, no one country could have pulled it off. And with the boundaries of science expanding, with experiments getting more and more costly, were going to need much more of this kind of collaboration and pooling resources to keep the progress going.

As the Prime Minister noted in his congratulatory message, the UK Government is “determined to ensure that the UK continues to be at the forefront of the next great scientific discoveries”. Hopefully many more researchers based in the UK will go on to make breakthroughs and be recognised by the Nobel committee. But those breakthroughs are unlikely to be the work of one person. They will certainly come quicker, and the impacts of them will be realised more fully, through collaboration – getting the best minds to meet, where ever they’re from.