Epstein Secrets

t is really there." I did so because the story I have told is the most profound ex- ample of this wise observation that I know of. I next described Plato's Allegory of the Cave because I know of no better or more lyrical representation of the actual history of science. The triumph of human existence

be correct. Things got more interesting when the LHC reported a tantalizing pos- sible signal due to a new particle about six times heavier than the Higgs particle. This particle did not have the characteristics one would expect for any supersymmetric partner of ordinary matter. In general the most e

ible scalar fields in nature. What about the Standard Model Higgs field? Could it play a role in all of these current cosmic shenanigans? Could the Higgs field store energy and be responsible for inflation either in the early universe or now? Could the Higgs field not be in its final ground state, an

r than light, ulti- mately disappearing from our horizon, leaving the universe cold, dark, and largely empty—the future that may result because of a Higgs field with a mass its times the mass of the proton could be far worse. For a Higgs mass coinciding with the allowed range of the observed 2P_Gleal

strates that the discovery that 'nature really follows the simple and elegant rules intuited by the twentieth- and twenty-first- century versions of Plato's philosopher? is one of the most astonishing achievements of the human intellect." —Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics

o endure any- thing, rather than think as they do and live after their manner." So much for those whose lives are lived entirely in illusion, which Plato suggests includes most of humanity. Then, the allegory states that the journey upward—into the light—is the ascent of the soul into the intellectua

, author of Just Six Numbers "It is an exhilarating experience to be led through this fascinating story, from Galileo to the Standard Model and the Higgs boson and beyond, with lucid detail and insight, illuminating vividly not only the achieve- ments themselves but also the joy of creative thought an

erform within the superconductor, as long as it remained su- perconducting, would reveal that photons are massless in the outside world. If you were Plato's philosopher inside such a superconductor, you would have to intuit an incredible amount about the outside world be- fore you could infer that a my

s would leave only the photon left over as a massless gauge boson. But there's more. By virtue of the gauge symmetry he introduced, Weinberg's new Higgs particle would also interact with electrons, and when the condensate formed, the effect would be to give electrons a mass as well as the W and Z pa

a revolutionary. But reluctant revolutionary he was, although, due to some shortsighted journal editors, he almost didn't get the chance. In 1960 Higgs had just taken up his post and had been asked to serve on the committee that coordinated the first Scottish Universities Summer School in Physics.