Hawking and Higgs have fall-out over boson
Hawking says it would be more exciting if the Higgs boson was not found
A bitter public argument has erupted between two of the world’s leading nuclear physicists, Professor Stephen Hawking and Professor Peter Higgs, the man who gave his name to the Higgs boson, the particle at the centre of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment that took place under Switzerland on Wednesday.
The row follows remarks made by Hawking that appear to suggest that Higgs's theories about the Big Bang and how it could be explained by LHC were somewhat off the mark. In an interview, Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, said that it would be "more exciting" if CERN’s £2.6 billion project did not find the "God particle" that it had set out to identify. "That will show something is wrong," he said, "and we will need to think again." Hawking argues that there are more interesting outcomes to be drawn from the LHC than the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Because of this Professor Higgs, 79, who first postulated the existence of the particle 44 years ago, is not pleased. "I have to confess I haven’t read the paper in which Stephen Hawking makes this claim," he said at a press conference yesterday. "But I have read one he wrote, which I think is the basis for the kind of calculation he does. And frankly I don’t think the way he does it is good enough.
"My understanding is he puts together theories in particle physics with gravity . . . in a way which no theoretical particle physicist would believe is the correct theory. From a particle physics, quantum theory point of view, you have to put a lot more than just gravity into the theory to have a consistent theory and I don’t think Stephen has done that. I am very doubtful about his calculations."
Strong stuff. And while some of the assembled scientists attempted to placate Higgs by saying that perhaps Hawking's remarks had been taken out of context – "Calm down, professor, it’s just a particle" – others said there were deeper motivations behind Hawking's remarks. Both men are contenders for the Nobel Prize, and the one who is proved correct is likely to emerge the eventual winner. High stakes, indeed. ·
