【聯合報╱By DENNIS OVERBYE╱陳世欽譯】
Nearly as Elusive as His Particle
EDINBURGH, Scotland — On October 8 last year, when the Nobel Prize in Physics was to be announced, Peter Higgs decided it would be a good day to get out of town.
Unfortunately, his car wasn’t working. He got as far as lunch before a neighbor told him that he had won the prize.
“What prize?” he joked.
It was in 1964 that Dr. Higgs, then a 35-year-old assistant professor at the University of Edinburgh, predicted the existence of a new particle — now known as the Higgs boson, or the “God particle” — that would explain how other particles get mass. Almost half a century later, on July 4, 2012, he wiped away a tear as he sat in a lecture hall at CERN, the European Organization of Nuclear Research in Geneva, and heard that his particle had finally been found.
Dr. Higgs, now 85, doesn’t own a television or use email or a cellphone , and his public appearances are rare. In a decade of covering the search for the Higgs boson, I had never managed to get a word with Dr. Higgs himself.
I finally found him looking relaxed and rumpled , perusing the menu in a bistro.
Dr. Higgs said he had adjusted, sort of, to his Nobel celebrity. “I’ve learned to just say no,” he said of people stopping him and asking for a photograph.
Dr. Higgs was born in Newcastle- upon-Tyne, England, in 1929, the son of a BBC engineer and a Scottish mother. His interest in physics was tweaked when as a schoolboy in Bristol, he realized he was attending the same school as had Paul Dirac, the British theorist. Dirac was the father of quantum field theory, which describes the forces of nature as a game of catch between force-carrying bits of energy called bosons, the field in which Dr. Higgs would rise to fame.
Retired from the University of Edinburgh, he lives in a fifthfloor walkup , around the corner from the birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell, the 19th-century Scottish theorist.
It was Maxwell who showed that electricity and magnetism were different manifestations of the same force, electromagnetism, that constitutes light. Dr. Higgs would help physics toward a theory you could write on a T-shirt: showing that Maxwell’s electromagnetism and the so-called weak force that governs radioactivity are different faces of the same thing.
But that’s not what Dr. Higgs thought he was doing. When he invented his boson in 1964, he said, “I wasn’t sure it would be important.”
It turned out that François Englert and Robert Brout of the Free University of Brussels had beaten him into print with the same idea . Three other physicists soon chimed in. Dr. Englert shared the Nobel with Dr. Higgs; Dr. Brout had died.
“For a while,” Dr. Higgs said, laughing, “I was calling it the ‘A.B.E.G.H.H.K.H’ mechanism,” reeling off the initials for all those who had contributed to the theory.
By 2000, Dr. Higgs had given up research, concluding that high-energy particle physics had moved beyond him. “I kept making silly mistakes,” he said.
Even before the Nobel sealed his place in history, he had become an Edinburgh tourist attraction, a sort of walking monument to science. In 1999, he turned down an offer of knighthood but in 2014 was named a Companion of Honor by Queen Elizabeth II.
Physicists still can’t explain the mass of the Higgs itself, which standard quantum calculations suggest should be almost infinite. This has led some theorists to propose that our universe is only one in an ensemble of universes, the multiverse, in which the value of things like the Higgs is random.
Asked about that, Dr. Higgs lit up with a big grin. “I’m not a believer,” he said.
“It’s hard enough to have a theory for one universe.”
粒子難理解 人也差不多
去年10月8日，也就是諾貝爾物理學獎得主名單要公布的當天，希格斯認為，那是個出城的好日子。
可惜他的車子故障。一個鄰居告訴他他已經得獎之前，他還在用午餐。
他開玩笑說：「什麼獎？」
1964年，時年35歲的希格斯博士是愛丁堡大學的助理教授。他當時就預言一種新粒子（如今所知的希格斯玻色子，或上帝的粒子）的存在，可用以解釋其他粒子如何產生質量。將近半個世紀後的2012年7月4日，他坐在位於日內瓦的歐洲核子研究組織的一間演講廳，聽到他的粒子終於已被科學家發現時，拭去眼淚。
現年85歲的希格斯沒有電視機，不使用電子郵件或手機，而且很少公開露面。在追蹤報導科學家尋找希格斯玻色子進展的10年之間，我（本文作者）從未跟希格斯博士本人說過話。
最後我總算看到他神態輕鬆，衣服皺皺的，在一間小飯館裡研究菜單。
希格斯表示，他已經適應因獲諾貝爾獎而出了名的日子。他提到請他停下腳步，想與他合影的民眾時說：「我已經學會直接說不。」
希格斯1929年生於英格蘭的泰恩河畔紐卡索，父親是英國廣播公司的工程師，母親是蘇格蘭人。還是布里斯托的一名學生時，他得知所就讀的學校英國理論物理學家德拉克也讀過，從此對物理學產生興趣。德拉克是量子場理論之父。這套理論把大自然的各種力量描述為名為玻色子的能量單位之間的相互捕捉。希格斯最後因為它而聲名大噪。
他已自愛丁堡大學退休，目前住在一間無電梯公寓的5樓，與19世紀蘇格蘭理論家麥斯威爾出生的地方近在咫尺。
麥斯威爾證明，電與磁是同一力量，亦即電磁力的不同形式，電磁則構成光。希格斯後來協助物理學邁向一套你可以寫在T恤上的理論：證明麥斯威爾的電磁力與主導輻射的所謂弱作用力是相同東西的不同面。
然而這不是希格斯當時認為自己研究的重點。他說，1964年假定玻色子存在時，「我不知道它會這麼重要」。
布魯塞爾自由大學的英格勒與畢洛特搶在他前面，正式發表同樣的概念。另外3名物理學家很快就跟進。英格勒與希格斯合得諾貝爾獎；畢洛特已病逝。
希格斯笑說：「有一段時間，我稱它『A.B.E.G.H.H.K.H』作用，取用對這項理論有貢獻的所有科學家姓氏的第一個字母合成。」
到2000年時，希格斯已不再從事研究工作。他認為高能量粒子物理學的進展他已經跟不上了。他說：「我不斷犯下可笑的錯誤。」
在諾貝爾獎奠定他的歷史地位之前，希格斯早就是愛丁堡吸引觀光客的焦點之一，有如走動的科學紀念碑。1999年，他婉拒騎士爵位。2014年，英國女王伊麗莎白二世頒授他榮譽勛爵爵位。
物理學家至今仍無法解釋希格斯玻色子本身的質量。根據標準的量子計算，它應該近乎無限。這導致部分理論家認為，我們的宇宙只是多重宇宙當中的一個。在這個多重宇宙中，類似希格斯玻色子等物質的值是隨機的。
希格斯談到這一點時笑說：「我不相信。」
「為一個宇宙提出一套理論已經夠難了。」
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