The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(47)

Did anybody else’s papers get stolen? Other than your father’s.

Not to my knowledge. But I really dont know.

You’d looked through them. The breadbox papers.

Yes. They were mostly on the weak force. People thought that the weak theory would end up looking like quantum electrodynamics but that wasnt his view. He thought the fact that this approach worked for QED didnt mean anything. Yang-Mills had been around for a few years but nobody knew what to do with the bosons that came with the theory.

They were thought to have no mass.

At the time they were thought to have no mass. Yes.

Like the photon.

Like the photon. Yes. The mediation was in these particles. The particles that came to be called the W and Z bosons.

The Yang-Mills vector bosons.

Yes. Glashow came up with a gauge theory that included the W particles and what he was now calling the Z particle. Still no real explanation for the masses. They were hand-fed in. Then in ’64 Higgs came up with his mechanism and Weinberg understood that if you could use the Higgs mechanism as a way to break the symmetry you could use it as a way to actually arrive at masses for the vector bosons. Or you could put it the other way around. The W particle initially got assigned a mass of forty GeVs and the Z particle eighty. They eventually turned out to be I think something like eighty and ninety-one. Weinberg published what is now a famous paper on this problem in 1967 and nobody read it. But my father read it. The theory still spun off these infinities that nobody could get rid of. I think the paper had five citations in five years. There didnt seem to be any way to square renormalization with Yang-Mills. ’t Hooft finally figured it out in 1971 but in the meantime my father already saw his edifice cracking and he sat down and attacked the Higgs problem but he couldnt get it to work. I think the word he used was incoherent.

He seemed to have been putting a lot of faith in an unproven theory.

The Higgs.

Yes.

He was a bit like Dirac. Or Chandrasekhar. He had an abiding faith in the aesthetic. He thought the Higgs paper too elegant to be wrong. For instance. You can add Glashow’s SU(5) theory to the list. Lovely theory. And wrong.

Is the Higgs wrong?

Dont know. In the meantime what was happening in the real world was Weinberg had figured out that Glashow’s Z particle had to be right. Everybody else hated it. The problem was that it was too massive. Just fucking enormous. The Z boson is heavier than some actual atoms. But even if you could get it up to speed in an accelerator you still had the problem that it had no charge. Still he figured that if you had these neutrino-nucleon collisions that spun off the W particle and gave you a lepton with the opposite charge you’d have to get a Z particle every once in a while. And since the Z carried no charge this meant that the neutrino coming in would stay a neutrino. Charge is conserved in the weak interaction the same as in any other interaction. You wouldnt see a lepton with the opposite charge to the W particle because it wouldnt be a W particle. It would be a Z particle. He figured that you wouldnt see anything, and that was what you had to look for. Or all you would see would be a burst of hadrons and that would be the signature of the Z that people said would never be found.

Asher sat with his pencil between his teeth. Neat, he said.

In any case, neutral current events were finally found at both CERN and Fermilab. Z particles. Some confusion about it but it went away. Weinberg and Glashow and Abdus Salam just won the Nobel Prize for the new electroweak theory.

The first step in Grand Unification.

Well. Maybe.

What happened to your father?

He died.

I know.

He left Berkeley and went up to a cabin in the Sierras. When I first went up there he was already sick. I went with him to the hospital at La Jolla. Why La Jolla I dont know. Then he went back to the Sierras. I think maybe he went back to La Jolla one more time. He had no reason to be hopeful about anything. The last time I saw him I just drove up there and spent the day. He’d papered the walls of the cabin with printouts of old particle collisions from the Bevatron. He’d lost a lot of weight. He didnt have much to say. The prints were stuff from the fifties. I suppose there must have been something like a sequence to them. Maybe I should have paid more attention. He didnt seem eager to talk about it and I didnt pursue it. It was beautiful up there. There were golden trout in the lakes. That’s a species, not just a color. But that was the last time I saw him. A few months later he was dead.

In Juarez Mexico.

Yes.

What happened to the cabin?

It burned down.

Was there anyone living in it?

No.

How did it happen to burn down?

I dont know. Maybe it was struck by lightning.

Struck by lightning.

One might suppose.

You left school after that.

Yes.

Why?

The history of physics is full of people who gave it up and went on to do something else. With few exceptions they have one thing in common.

Which is?

They werent good enough.

And you?

I was okay. I could do it. Just not at the level where it really mattered.

And your father?

Most physicists have neither the talent nor the balls to take on the really hard problems. But even sorting out the significant problem from among the thousands is a talent not thick on the ground.

What led him back to the Bevatron plates?

I dont know. I think he spent time just mulling over the laws of the universe. Are they immutable? Things that once seemed to have been resolved. Are there in fact completely massless particles? Gauge invariance aside. Are you sure? If you had leptons with a mass of ten to the minus whatever how close could they get to the speed of light? Is it measurable?