In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European research body, was upgrading its particle collider to create what it called the Large Hadron Collider. This underground apparatus ran beneath the French-Swiss border and it was so vast that its diameter equalled that of the Circle Line.
Two beams of subatomic particles called protons would be fired around this subterranean loop in opposing directions and smashed together at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light. The scientists’ aim was to prove the existence of a fundamental particle called the Higgs Boson, which they hoped would appear momentarily from the sub-atomic luminescence.
Waldegrave grasped the significance of the project. He happened to be MP for Bristol West, which is where Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist who first proposed the existence of the boson, grew up. And if the particle were discovered, it would be a highly welcome expression of British scientific ingenuity.
But what on earth is a Higgs Boson? If he was to persuade the Treasury to stump up, Waldegrave knew he had to find an accessible answer to that question. The answer was provided by a particle physicist from UCL called David Miller, who certainly gauged his audience well. Imagine Margaret Thatcher walks into a roomful of supporters, Miller said. As she enters, she is free- moving and unencumbered, but the moment the crowd sees her, they surround her. This, he explained, is how the Higgs field acts on certain particles. When they interact with the field, they gain mass. The Higgs Boson is a product of that field.
It was a clever description – and it worked. As Frank Close explains in this thorough and fascinating book, Britain continued its contribution to Cern.
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