[US]Liang Lederman, Dick Teresi: The God Particle—If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?, translated by Mi Xijun, Gu Hongwei, Zhao Jianhui, and Chen Hongwei, proofread by Yin Chuanhong, Shanghai Science and Technology Education Press, December 2003, 33.5 yuan
This book is one of the Gold Fleece series. At 400,000 characters, it is far too long for a popular science book; still, since it is a popular work by a Nobel Prize winner in physics, it is rare enough.
The theme of the book is humankind’s quest for the “atom” (the basic element of the world), from Democritus, Newton, Dalton, all the way to modern physics. Of course, what it mainly introduces is the modern physics centered on quantum mechanics and its pursuit of the “atom.”
The God Particle is Lederman’s nickname for the “Higgs particle.” Below I have quoted his explanation of this naming. The section following the excerpt on page 24 is “The Tower of Babel and the Accelerator”—Lederman likens building the Tower of Babel to building an accelerator, and the metaphor is indeed apt. Scientists’ pursuit of the “God particle,” and their obsessive pursuit of a harmonious, beautiful, and simple “Grand Unified Theory,” is in the same lineage as the religious and philosophical quests of the West over the past thousands of years. So although Lederman’s invocation of “God” is mostly just in a joking spirit, I still regard this book as one of the reference works for examining the relationship between science and religion.
In the end, the construction of the “Tower of Babel”—the superaccelerator—was forced to die aborning because the U.S. Congress stopped funding it. This result must have caused many physicists great sorrow (and also intensified scientists’ hatred of anti-scientists, relativists, and the sociology of science). Most ordinary people would of course be skeptical about pouring in tens of billions of dollars, requiring hundreds of millions a year to maintain, with a circumference of about 87 kilometers, consuming the electricity of several towns when in use, all for the sake of colliding protons—what on earth is this monster for? In fact, perhaps like the “Tower of Babel,” this magnificent structure itself had no practical purpose at all, but was only meant so that “the top may reach to heaven, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4). I completely sympathize with this grand plan—although such a plan sometimes makes people forget humility, scientists are not dictators, nor do they have investors rich enough to rival a nation; if you want taxpayers to foot the bill, popular science is a necessity, and if the public won’t buy it, there is no one else to blame.
I only skimmed this book and did not read it carefully, so it is not easy to judge its merits and faults. The author is quite witty in many places, but as an introduction to quantum mechanics this book is certainly not the best I have seen. Still, it is not bad either. But in any case, the greatest value of reading this book is not to understand quantum mechanics, but rather to get a more direct sense of how top physicists think and what they are like in style.
Below are several passages copied down from my portable notes, with no further comment for the moment.
Page24: One of the main reasons for building a supercollider is to search for the Higgs boson. We believe that only a superconducting supercollider has the energy needed to produce and detect the Higgs boson. Because this boson is so important to physics today, so indispensable to our ultimate understanding of the structure of matter, and yet so elusive, I gave it a nickname: the God Particle. Why call it the God Particle? There are two reasons. First, the publisher would not allow us to call it the “goddamn particle,” though considering its “evil” nature, plus the enormous sums spent on it, I think that name might be even more appropriate. Second, this name has all sorts of connections with another book, a much older book…
Page27: Although Fermilab is the most complex scientific laboratory in the world, anyone can drive(or walk or ride a bicycle)in. Many federal agencies are heavily guarded for reasons of secrecy, but Fermilab’s calling is to reveal secrets, not to keep them. In the radical 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission(AEC)gave Robert R. Wilson, (my predecessor and the laboratory’s first director), a heads-up that they had to be prepared at all times to deal with the radical students who would gather and make trouble at the gates of Fermilab. Wilson’s method was simple. He told the AEC that he needed only one weapon to hold off the demonstrators by himself: a physics lecture. He assured the Commission that this weapon was fearsome enough to drive away even the most courageous agitators. To this day, the laboratory director still has to prepare a physics lecture for emergencies. Let us pray that this tactic will never have to be used.
Page200 Quantum theory has been declared by many writers to be akin to certain religions and mysticism, and so it has rightly become their target. Classical Newtonian physics is often described as real, reliable, logical, and very intuitive. The appearance of bizarre, counterintuitive quantum theory and its “replacement” of it is really hard to understand and feels threatening. One solution—found in some of the books discussed above—is to treat quantum theory as a religion. Why not treat it as a form of Hinduism(or Buddhism, etc.)? Then we can throw out logic too,
Page205 This does not mean that science and Eastern religions have suddenly discovered a great many commonalities. Even so, if the authors’ religious metaphor of combining new physics with Eastern mysticism is in some sense helpful to you in understanding the revolution in modern physics, then by all means use it that way! But metaphors are metaphors after all; they are only crude images. To borrow an old saying: never take the map for the territory. Physics is not religion; if it were, funding would not be so hard to come by.
Page387 So it seems that the concept of Higgs is a good one. Then why hasn’t it been widely accepted?? Peter Higgs, the scientist who (reluctantly) gave his name to this concept, was working on something else. Veltman, one of the builders of Higgs theory, called the concept a “cleaning pad” for hiding human ignorance. Glashow was less friendly: he called Higgs a “toilet,” in which we “flush away” the inconsistencies of existing theory. Some of the other major objections concern the complete absence of experimental evidence for Higgs.
Page410 The Higgs field once represented all the energy of particle creation. It temporarily withdrew, then appeared several times in different disguises, in order to maintain mathematical consistency, eliminate infinities, and manage the ever-growing complexity of relations produced by forces and the further differentiation of particles. This is the brilliant, resplendent “God Particle.”
Pages420~421 What is astonishing is that our scientists, who are brilliant in other respects, so often forget the lessons of history: namely, that science’s greatest impact on society comes from those studies that drive people to search for the “atom.” Even leaving aside its contributions to genetic engineering, materials science, or controlled nuclear fusion, the inquiry into the “atom” itself has already repaid its cost millions of times over; and so far there is no sign that this situation will change. Investment in abstract research amounting to less than one percent of industrial budgets has performed far better than the Dow Jones Index over 300 years. And yet, time and again we are threatened by frustrated authorities who only want to focus science on society’s immediate needs, forgetting—or perhaps never having understood—that the overwhelming majority of major scientific and technological advances that affect the quality and quantity of human life come from pure, abstract, curiosity-driven research. Amen.
September 7, 2007
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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