Quantum physics

The discovery of the Higgs particle is one step further on a long road – the search for the nature of matter. Our experience of matter starts in childhood, when we become familiar with objects and learn to live with them – how to pick them up when they’re useful and avoid bumping into them when they’re not. Our

The big question is: what is the process that somehow freezes or condenses energy into particles of matter? In this process, the energy somehow acquires the characteristic of mass – for which we can go again to David Bohm: ‘Mass is a phenomenon of connecting light rays which go back and forth, sort of freezing them into a pattern.’ It

When the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie died in 1899 he was a bitter and disappointed man. True, his mathematical ability had been recognised by some of the greatest people in the field, including the great German mathematician Felix Klein, and Lie had succeeded Klein in the chair of mathematics at Leipzig. But those who understood the true significance of

The weak interactions are really weak compared to the strong ones. Indeed they are really weak compared to electromagnetism – about 100 billion times weaker. Yet there are also some similarities with electromagnetism. As far back as 1941 Julian Schwinger had felt that these similarities were significant, and took a step forward in a paper of 1957. Schwinger is

Higgs 5: The strong dominate the field By the mid-1960s, the situation in particle physics was not good. Its aim had been to uncover the basic building blocks of matter, and for a time the end seemed in sight. In 1917 Ernest Rutherford had split the atom and showed it consisted of an electrically positive nucleus surrounded by

Higgs 6: Can the circle be unbroken? In the 1960s the tide in physics flowed towards tackling the strong interactions, as those grappling with the weak interactions had come up against an apparently unshiftable block. The technique that seemed to be the most powerful one was the use of symmetry, and the use of Lie groups enabled a classification