2 minute read
Higgs and his boson
Somewhere towards the end
to demand an “arbitration mechanism” to resolve any disputes with China over implementation of the Joint Declaration (the two countries’ treaty of 1984 concerning Hong Kong’s future). British officials argued this was unnecessary because the development of democracy would help protect Hong Kong. But the “phoney” effort to consult the public about this, which purported to show that Hong Kongers wanted to put off the introduction of direct elections to the legislature, resulted in a big delay. Lord Patten says Britain made a “strategic error” in the mid1980s by seeming “to concede the point that everything we did before 1997 had to converge with whatever the Chinese wanted to do afterwards”.
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The postscript says the absence of an arbitration mechanism was among the factors that “sabotaged Hong Kong’s chances”. But Lord Patten does not make clear whether he thinks that an earlier, more assertive approach by Britain to the introduction of democracy in Hong Kong would have helped to avoid the tumult of 2019 and the subsequent clampdown. Under Chinese rule, the lack of democracy has been a catalyst of Hong Kong’s largescale protest movements. But the party was never likely to conclude—as Lord Patten tried to persuade Chinese officials—that more democracy could help ensure stability. Especially since the Tiananmen Square upheaval of 1989, it has viewed political liberalisation as a threat to its survival.
Lord Patten spent much of his time in Hong Kong struggling against British officials and members of the local elite who believed it was not worth trying to push China to accept more democracy in prehandover Hong Kong—much less expanding it without China’s approval. Some of the most riveting detail in this rich volume relates to these tensions.
He names several of the senior bureaucrats and businessmen who were enemies of his political reforms and revels in pointing out their cravenness and hypocrisy (the partypraising, patrioticsounding locals who criticise him often have foreign passports). But he reserves particular contempt for Sir Percy Cradock, a British diplomat who had retired by the time Lord Patten took up his post in 1992. He says Cradock’s “cloven hoof” was not difficult to spot on those “smoking gun” telegrams uncovered shortly before the handover. “But even at my age I’m capable of being shocked.”
The author’s entertaining language brings these diaries to life. They were clearly written (or dictated) for a wide audience as well as his close circle. The escapades of his Norfolk terriers, Whisky and Soda, are as keenly observed as the machinations of his critics. As he sails off on the Royal yacht, Britannia, after a handover ceremony attended by the “coelacanths of Leninism” (who had given up on the idea of outcompeting Britannia by arriving in their own vast boat), his enemies are still on his tail: Chinese intelligence ships that “must have been mystified by the amount of ‘face’ being given to the departed colonial governor”. n
Peter Higgs and his boson Hide and seek
Elusive. By Frank Close. Basic Books; 304 pages; $26. Allen Lane; £25
On the morning of October 8th 2013, no one could find Peter Higgs. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had been trying to get hold of him on the phone for hours—its custom being to try to speak to the winners of a Nobel prize in the moments before making the decision known to the world. Despite delaying proceedings that day until past lunchtime, the Swedes could not locate Mr Higgs and had to press on with the announcement of that year’s physics prize without his knowledge.
Frank Close’s new book tells Mr Higgs’s side of that story. He had spent a year preparing to disappear, it turns out. First, he threw journalists off the scent—they thought he had planned a jaunt to the Scottish Highlands that day. On the morning itself Mr Higgs discreetly left his flat in Edinburgh, took a fivekilometre bus ride to Leith and vanished for a few hours.
It is an apt anecdote with which to open a book called “Elusive”. “There are some who revel in fame and public adulation,” writes Mr Close. “Higgs is not one of them.” That shyness is reflected in the particle named after him—the Higgs boson. Its existence was predicted in 1964, but it did not show its face to the world until 2012.
The Higgs boson is the cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics, the quantum mechanical description of all known elementary particles. In the theory’s earliest years in the 1950s and 1960s, one of its many open questions was: where did the mass of the various particles come from? If subatomic particles did not have any mass, they would zoom around the universe at the speed of light for eternity, never slowing down enough to coalesce into atoms, people, planets or stars.
In 1964 Mr Higgs had worked it out. He proposed that the universe is permeated by an invisible force field. How strongly an elementary particle interacts with this Higgs field, as it came to be known, is what is commonly interpreted as its mass.
Mr Close is among today’s best writers on the history of quantum mechanics and its associated field theories, and his book is more a biography of the boson than of the man. He rattles through Mr Higgs’s life story in the first few chapters. He was a sickly child and missed the first year of school. Thanks to a library at home, he went on to teach himself basic trigonometry, algebra and calculus.
When Mr Higgs started at Cotham Secondary School in Bristol, he discovered that one of the alumni was Paul Dirac, a pioneer of quantum mechanics and the school’s first Nobel laureate. Mr Higgs’s physics teacher, Mr Willis, had also taught Dirac 30 years earlier. Nevertheless, Mr Higgs found the school physics syllabus “very boring” and admitted, “I never won a prize for physics at school.”
Mr Higgs was not the only scientist to predict the massgiving force field in 1964 but, crucially, he was the only one to add, at the last minute and as an afterthought, a short paragraph at the end of one of his pa
A boson in the wild
