Sometimes when I am standing on the beach, staring out at the ocean, watching waves roll in, I will become moved with the inarticulate sense of nature, the sublimity of it all. And even if I have my phone with me, I avoid taking pictures – just enjoying the mental photogenic moment. Because the sublime is sublime because it exceeds representation, defies it, confronts our puny understandings with phenomena we can’t fully assimilate.
Photo by Scott Eisen, a freelance photojournalist who often shoots for Getty Images. He shot last week’s total solar eclipse from Colebrook, New Hampshire
Peter Higgs at the Science Museum in London in 2013 at the opening of the special exhibit on the Higgs boson and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland which proved his theoretical predictions.
14 April 2024 (Crete) – Last week I watched the total solar eclipse via my laptop, via a hook-up offered by an observatory in which I am a member. Then I read some of the reports coming in from the people who had seen it from the totality zone. People were similar in their descriptions: “it was an indescribably profound, perspective-shifting, life-altering experience” and “I’m a different person now, someone who can only be understood by other people who saw the total solar eclipse.” It was massively FOMOy.
Solar eclipses happen when the moon passes directly through the invisible line connecting the sun and Earth, something that doesn’t happen very often because space is big and the invisible line is skinny. Here’s a very not-to-scale diagram (to make it to scale, picture the sun being a basketball on one side of the basketball court, the Earth being a 2mm-diameter pebble on the other side of the court, and the moon being a small grain of sand about 7cm away from the pebble):
Earthlings are very lucky, eclipse-wise. Most planets don’t have a big enough moon to create a total solar eclipse. Not only is our moon big enough, it’s about exactly the size of the sun in our night sky because, by sheer coincidence, the sun is about 400 times farther from us than the moon and also about 400 times bigger than the moon in diameter—making our eclipses especially breathtaking. Yes, an astonishing perfection of size, distance and relationships.
The Ancient Greeks called these intervals the exeligmos – a “turning of the wheel” – and their earliest cosmology holding that the sun and the moon were great wheels of fire emitting their light at certain apertures. And they developed an uncanny math to predict when they would occur, using an intricate piece of bronze clockwork, the oldest known analog computer. When time permits, I will write a post explaining how it worked.
There are about 70 total solar eclipses every century, each resulting in a thin path of total sun blockage. For most of history, there was no way to know when or where they would happen. Only the very lucky few who happened to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right weather, got to experience a total solar eclipse.
Today you can ensure that you will have the opportunity to see one — and, yes, I passed up last week’s opportunity and I shall not be alive for the next one.
We see stars all the time, so we’re well-acquainted with our reality living in outer space (even if it’s easy to forget during the day). But when I looked at the sky during the total eclipse (via my computer hook-up), it was the first time I had experienced another, totally different way to see with my eyes that I lived in outer space. I saw one sphere positioned in front of another sphere, with two other spheres – Venus and Jupiter – floating nearby (my observatory’s work was simply brilliant).
More than ever before, it felt obvious that I was standing on the edge of a fifth sphere. For the first time in my life, I was looking at the Solar System. One close friend who was in the U.S. and lived in a state perfectly positioned, said:
I looked around. It was dark. At 2pm. There was a 360° sunset along the entire horizon—another first. By a minute in, there was a chorus of chirping crickets that hadn’t been there before. Birds were flying around overhead that hadn’t been there before. The cows continued being cows but I assume they were super confused.
I looked back up at the Solar System and noticed a little imperfection on the edge of the black moon circle, which I later learned was a solar prominence. A solar prominence I could see with my naked eye.
Only half of my brain was focused on the eclipse because the other half was frantically trying to figure out how to best use the precious minutes. But then I said to myself I am not going to take pics. I just wanted to experience it, to just enjoy it in the moment. It is too sublime to capture.
Ah, yes. To experience it, to enjoy it, to just live in the moment. I get that. As I noted in the intro above, the sublime is sublime because it exceeds representation, defies it, confronts our puny understandings with phenomena we can’t fully assimilate. You are sensing something limitless and eternal – awe in the face of the natural forces that exceed this world.
It is like books you read. You think most of what you’ve read has disappeared from memory. But none of it really goes away. You might forget the plot, the author, etc. But the essence of what you’ve read remains somewhere within you. Nourishing your mind. Making you cleverer. And more complicated. But trust me: it is all sitting there, inside your mind. So will the eclipse.
Since photography is no longer constrained by the material limits of film, the act of taking pictures seems liberated from documentary purposes. They are not saved for special occasions and can’t mark special occasions in the same way. The images don’t have to turn out. Yes, from time to time I still take pictures of the ocean – but not to see what the ocean looked like but to express my mood at that moment in a gesture, to modulate it, to tell myself “I am having a subjective experience, an encounter with reality, that I want to put a frame around and set aside”. But I rarely look back at them.
I wonder if people photographed the eclipse for similar reasons. One could begin to fall into the bottomless well of contemplation about the significance and fragility of our place in the universe, or one could take a picture to stand in for that idea, to have something more practical to do. It’s not like the image itself will be compelling in its own right.
But what I have noticed immediately from a friend who watched it “live” was a common theme: the photographs simply do not measure up to their expectations, and experiences and memories of what they saw. But isn’t that true of almost anything you might photograph for the purposes of documenting how special the experience was? Most of the specialness rests in “how one had to be there, experiencing it”. While everyone wants to see an eclipse, no one really wants to see your picture of an eclipse, including yourself.
I think we’ll find that like any other tourist photo, eclipse photos are mundane and superfluous in and of themselves, but they still feel obligatory to take and thus become an image of the obligation. Our expectations include taking photos of our experiences because that is how we know they are experiences as they are happening. It is also what everyone else is doing. The photos represent the photo-takers’ capability to conform, to be normal, an accomplishment conveyed by the utter familiarity or predictability of the image. We use our phones to take something that seems rare or singular – and we make it into something extremely ordinary. The phone allows us to subordinate the event to our desire to belong.
But I also found, from numerous friends, that viewing the eclipse with a group was a conspicuously collective experience – and these people seem to have a better shared experience that continues long after the eclipse ends. Yes, photographs were taken but they serve as memory markers and tangible proof that you were there to witness the eclipse, through a wondrous engagement with others. Almost a “souvenir” of that momentary intimation of the era of myth, when reality and experience were supposedly untroubled by mediation and everyone lived in the shared, immediate presence of being.
Just living in the moment.
Waaaaaaay back in 2010, Nick Patience (one of the founders of 451 Research) invited me to attend the annual 451 Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit in London. I had known Nick for a number of years and he had invited me to several 451 events where the knowledge I gained informed my work and my blog posts.
But the Cloud Summit was different. Nick introduced me to Brian Cox, who was the keynote speaker. Brian, as most of you know, is Professor of Particle Physics and one of the leaders on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. He is a physics star turned pin-up professor whose several series on the solar system and science have sent his career into orbit. Universities who have seen a surge in applications for physics programs call it the “‘Brian Cox effect”.
I actually have a physics degree – a “minor degree” which means I had a reduced course load from my “major degree” (economics). And – irony of ironies – it was that physics degree that got me my first job, on Wall Street. Long story. Fodder for another post.
At that cloud conference – populated by folks who certainly work with large amounts of data – Brian dazzled the crowd with real data loads. Like the the 40 terabytes that were created – per second. That’s was how much data was thrown off at the time by the LHC, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.
That introduction led to an email exchange, and an invitation to CERN which is located near Geneva. It rekindled my interest in physics and led to a whole string of further introductions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), the Swiss AI Lab, the Delft University of Technology, the Grenoble Institute of Technology, etc., etc. And it also led to the start of my AI/informatics program.
All of this came flooding back last week when I learned of the death of Peter Higgs (age 94) on April 8th, the same day of the eclipse. He was an unassuming star in the science community. He valued the respect of his colleagues and treasured his occasional “bright ideas” about the way the universe worked.
The fact that one of those bright ideas ended up boiled down into an object bearing his name, which became the subject of a world-encompassing multi-billion-dollar “quest”, was a source of some exasperation. The Higgs boson’s discovery, he said, “ruined my life”.
The discovery of the Higgs boson came nearly 50 years after Higgs’s prediction, and he said he never expected it to be found in his lifetime.
Dr Higgs’s best-known bright idea was arcane but crucial, and I am going to now grossly simplify it and eliminate a lot of the jargon, using Peter Greene’s explanation from his book on the subject, and bits and bobs from the Nobel Prize Committee lengthy description which they published at the time they gave Higgs the physics prize:
Peter Greene opens with a famous story in the annals of physics that tells of a 5-year-old Albert Einstein, sick in bed, receiving a toy compass from his father. The boy was both puzzled and mesmerized by the invisible forces at work, redirecting the compass needle to point north whenever its resting position was disturbed. That experience, Einstein would later say, convinced him that there was a deep hidden order to nature, and impelled him to spend his life trying to reveal it.
Although the story is more than a century old, the conundrum young Einstein encountered resonates with a key theme in contemporary physics, one that’s essential to the most important experimental achievement in the field of the last 50 years: the discovery the Higgs boson.
Stick with me. This is a wee bit long.
1. Science in general, and physics in particular, seek patterns. Stretch a spring twice as far, and feel twice the resistance. A pattern. Increase the volume an object occupies while keeping its mass fixed, and the higher it floats in water. A pattern. By carefully observing patterns, researchers uncover physical laws that can be expressed in the language of mathematical equations.
2. A clear pattern is also evident in the case of a compass: Move it and the needle points north again. I can imagine a young Einstein thinking there must be a general law stipulating that suspended metallic needles are pushed north. But no such law exists. When there is a magnetic field in a region, certain metallic objects experience a force that aligns them along the field’s direction, whatever that direction happens to be. And Earth’s magnetic field happens to point north.
3. The example is simple but the lesson profound. Nature’s patterns sometimes reflect two intertwined features: fundamental physical laws and environmental influences. It’s nature’s version of nature versus nurture. In the case of a compass, disentangling the two is not difficult. By manipulating it with a magnet, you readily conclude the magnet’s orientation determines the needle’s direction. But there can be other situations where environmental influences are so pervasive, and so beyond our ability to manipulate, it would be far more challenging to recognize their influence.
4. Physicists tell a parable about fish investigating the laws of physics but so habituated to their watery world they fail to consider its influence. The fish struggle mightily to explain the gentle swaying of plants as well as their own locomotion. The laws they ultimately find are complex and unwieldy. Then, one brilliant fish has a breakthrough. Maybe the complexity reflects simple fundamental laws acting themselves out in a complex environment—one that’s filled with a viscous, incompressible and pervasive fluid: the ocean. At first, the insightful fish is ignored, even ridiculed. But slowly, the others, too, realize that their environment, its familiarity notwithstanding, has a significant impact on everything they observe.
5. Does the parable cut closer to home than we might have thought? Might there be other, subtle yet pervasive features of the environment that, so far, we’ve failed to properly fold into our understanding? The discovery of the Higgs particle by the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva convinced physicists that the answer is a resounding yes.
6. More than a half-century ago, Peter Higgs and a handful of other physicists were trying to understand the origin of a basic physical feature: mass. You can think of mass as an object’s heft or, a little more precisely, as the resistance it offers to having its motion changed. Push on a freight train (or a feather) to increase its speed, and the resistance you feel reflects its mass. At a microscopic level, the freight train’s mass comes from its constituent molecules and atoms, which are themselves built from fundamental particles, electrons and quarks. But where do the masses of these and other fundamental particles come from?
7. When physicists in the 1960s modeled the behavior of these particles using equations rooted in quantum physics, they encountered a puzzle. If they imagined that the particles were all massless, then each term in the equations clicked into a perfectly symmetric pattern, like the tips of a perfect snowflake. And this symmetry was not just mathematically elegant. It explained patterns evident in the experimental data. But—and here’s the puzzle—physicists knew that the particles did have mass, and when they modified the equations to account for this fact, the mathematical harmony was spoiled. The equations became complex and unwieldy and, worse still, inconsistent.
8. What to do? Here’s the idea put forward by Higgs. Don’t shove the particles’ masses down the throat of the beautiful equations. Instead, keep the equations pristine and symmetric, but consider them operating within a peculiar environment. Imagine that all of space is uniformly filled with an invisible substance—now called the Higgs field—that exerts a drag force on particles when they accelerate through it. Push on a fundamental particle in an effort to increase its speed and, according to Higgs, you would feel this drag force as a resistance. Justifiably, you would interpret the resistance as the particle’s mass. For a mental toehold, think of a ping-pong ball submerged in water. When you push on the ping-pong ball, it will feel much more massive than it does outside of water. Its interaction with the watery environment has the effect of endowing it with mass. So with particles submerged in the Higgs field.
9. In 1964, Higgs submitted a paper to a prominent physics journal in which he formulated this idea mathematically. The paper was rejected. Not because it contained a technical error, but because the premise of an invisible something permeating space, interacting with particles to provide their mass, well, it all just seemed like heaps of overwrought speculation. The editors of the journal deemed it “of no obvious relevance to physics.”
10. But Higgs persevered (and his revised paper appeared later that year in another journal), and physicists who took the time to study the proposal gradually realized that his idea was a stroke of genius, one that allowed them to have their cake and eat it too. In Higgs’ scheme, the fundamental equations can retain their pristine form because the dirty work of providing the particles’ masses is relegated to the environment.
11. I can attest that by the mid-1980s, the assessment had changed. The physics community had, for the most part, fully bought into the idea that there was a Higgs field permeating space. Professors teaching what’s known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics (the quantum equations physicists have assembled to describe the particles of matter and the dominant forces by which they influence each other) were presenting the Higgs field with such certainty that for a long while most students had no idea it had yet to be established experimentally. On occasion, that happens in physics. Mathematical equations can sometimes tell such a convincing tale, they can seemingly radiate reality so strongly, that they become entrenched in the vernacular of working physicists, even before there’s data to confirm them.
12. But it’s only with data that a link to reality can be forged. How can we test for the Higgs field? This is where the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes in. Winding its way hundreds of yards under Geneva, Switzerland, crossing the French border and back again, the LHC is a nearly 17-mile-long circular tunnel that serves as a racetrack for smashing together particles of matter. The LHC is surrounded by about 9,000 superconducting magnets, and is home to streaming hordes of protons, cycling around the tunnel in both directions, which the magnets accelerate to just shy of the speed of light. At such speeds, the protons whip around the tunnel about 11,000 times each second, and when directed by the magnets, engage in millions of collisions in the blink of an eye. The collisions, in turn, produce fireworks-like sprays of particles, which mammoth detectors capture and record.
13. One of the main motivations for the LHC, which cost on the order of $10 billion and involves thousands of scientists from dozens of countries, was to search for evidence for the Higgs field. The math showed that if the idea is right, if we are really immersed in an ocean of Higgs field, then the violent particle collisions should be able to jiggle the field, much as two colliding submarines would jiggle the water around them. And every so often, the jiggling should be just right to flick off a speck of the field—a tiny droplet of the Higgs ocean—which would appear as the long-sought Higgs particle.
14. The calculations also showed that the Higgs particle would be unstable, disintegrating into other particles in a minuscule fraction of a second. Within the maelstrom of colliding particles and billowing clouds of particulate debris, scientists armed with powerful computers would search for the Higgs’ fingerprint—a pattern of decay products dictated by the equations.
15. In the early morning hours of July 4, 2012, almost every physicist on the planet – and over 1,800 science reporters – tuned into a live-stream of a press conference at the Large Hadron Collider facilities in Geneva. About six months earlier, two independent teams of researchers charged with gathering and analyzing the LHC data had announced a strong indication that the Higgs particle had been found. The rumor now flying around the physics community was that the teams finally had sufficient evidence to stake a definitive claim. Coupled with the fact that Peter Higgs himself had been asked to make the trip to Geneva, there was ample motivation to stay up past 3 a.m. (for the U.S. crowd) to hear the announcement live.
16. And as the world came to quickly learn, the evidence that the Higgs particle had been detected was strong enough to cross the threshold of discovery. With the Higgs particle now officially found, the audience in Geneva broke out into wild applause, as no doubt dozens of similar gatherings around the globe. Peter Higgs wiped away a tear.
17. With a year of hindsight, and additional data that has only served to make the case for the Higgs stronger, here’s how Peter Greene summarized the discovery’s most important implications:
First, we’ve long known that there are invisible inhabitants in space. Radio and television waves. The Earth’s magnetic field. Gravitational fields. But none of these is permanent. None is unchanging. None is uniformly present throughout the universe. In this regard, the Higgs field is fundamentally different. We believe its value is the same on Earth as near Saturn, in the Orion Nebulae, throughout the Andromeda Galaxy and everywhere else. As far as we can tell, the Higgs field is indelibly imprinted on the spatial fabric.
Second, the Higgs particle represents a new form of matter, which had been widely anticipated for decades but had never been seen. Early in the 20th century, physicists realized that particles, in addition to their mass and electric charge, have a third defining feature: their spin. But unlike a child’s top, a particle’s spin is an intrinsic feature that doesn’t change; it doesn’t speed up or slow down over time. Electrons and quarks all have the same spin value, while the spin of photons—particles of light—is twice that of electrons and quarks. The equations describing the Higgs particle showed that—unlike any other fundamental particle species—it should have no spin at all. Data from the Large Hadron Collider have now confirmed this.
Third, establishing the existence of a new form of matter is a rare achievement, but the result has resonance in another field: cosmology, the scientific study of how the entire universe began and developed into the form we now witness. For many years, cosmologists studying the Big Bang theory were stymied. They had pieced together a robust description of how the universe evolved from a split second after the beginning, but they were unable to give any insight into what drove space to start expanding in the first place. What force could have exerted such a powerful outward push? For all its success, the Big Bang theory left out the bang.
Fourth, in the 1980s, a possible solution was discovered, one that rings a loud Higgsian bell. If a region of space is uniformly suffused with a field whose particulate constituents are spinless, then Einstein’s theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) reveals that a powerful repulsive force can be generated—a bang, and a big one at that. Calculations showed that it was difficult to realize this idea with the Higgs field itself; the double duty of providing particle masses and fueling the bang proves a substantial burden.
But insightful scientists realized that by positing a second “Higgs-like” field (possessing the same vanishing spin, but different mass and interactions), they could split the burden—one field for mass and the other for the repulsive push—and offer a compelling explanation of the bang. Because of this, for more than 30 years, theoretical physicists have been vigorously exploring cosmological theories in which such Higgs-like fields play an essential part.
Thousands of journal articles have been written developing these ideas, and billions of dollars have been spent on deep space observations seeking—and finding—indirect evidence that these theories accurately describe our universe. The LHC’s confirmation that at least one such field actually exists thus puts a generation of cosmological theorizing on a far firmer foundation.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the discovery of the Higgs particle is an astonishing triumph of mathematics’ power to reveal the workings of the universe. It’s a story that’s been recapitulated in physics numerous times, but each new example thrills just the same.
The possibility of black holes emerged from the mathematical analyses of German physicist Karl Schwarzchild; subsequent observations proved that black holes are real. Big Bang cosmology emerged from the mathematical analyses of Alexander Friedmann and also Georges Lemaître; subsequent observations proved this insight correct as well. The concept of anti-matter first emerged from the mathematical analyses of quantum physicist Paul Dirac; subsequent experiments showed that this idea, too, is right. These examples give a feel for what the great mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner meant when he spoke of the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing the physical universe.” The Higgs field emerged from mathematical studies seeking a mechanism to endow particles with mass. And once again the math has come through with flying colors.
Peter Greene says in this conclusion:
As a theoretical physicist myself, one of many dedicated to finding what Einstein called the “unified theory”—the deeply hidden connections between all of nature’s forces and matter that Einstein dreamed of, long after being hooked on physics by the mysterious workings of the compass—the discovery of the Higgs is especially gratifying. Our work is driven by mathematics, and has so far not made contact with experimental data. We are anxiously awaiting 2015 when an upgraded and yet more powerful LHC will be switched back on, as there’s a fighting chance that the new data will provide evidence that our theories are heading in the right direction. Major milestones would include the discovery of a class of hitherto unseen particles (called “supersymmetric” particles) that our equations predict, or hints of the wild possibility of spatial dimensions beyond the three we all experience. More exciting still would be the discovery of something completely unanticipated, sending us all scurrying back to our blackboards.
Many physicists have been trying to scale these mathematical mountains for 30 years, some even longer. At times they have felt the unified theory was just beyond their fingertips, while at other times they were truly groping in the dark. But it was a great boost for our generation to witness the confirmation of the Higgs, to witness four-decade-old mathematical insights realized as pops and crackles in the LHC detectors. It reminds us to take the words of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg to heart:
“Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world”.
Sometimes, those numbers and equations have an uncanny, almost eerie ability to illuminate otherwise dark corners of reality. When they do, we get that much closer to grasping our place in the cosmos.
So, the LHC delivered the goods in 2012, and the Nobel prize committee followed suit the next year. Higgs grinned (sometimes) and bore the attention. It was not just that the particle carried his name. Their story was so beguiling: the humble theorist in his garret (actually a third-floor flat in Edinburgh, Scotland) who goes unheralded for decades but whose ideas eventually change the world: how’s that for the untrammelled power of the singular mind?
But it was never really true, as Higgs said time and time again. Higgs, as he always made clear, was one of many scientists coming up with similar ideas at a time when using soundbite-friendly baubles to win funding for city-sized accelerators was still unthinkable.
It might have been best had it stayed so. What scientists actually want from big science rarely boils down to a single thing; they want the means with which to explore widely. The public wants to know that new discoveries are being made. Casting scientific projects as quests for some pre-ordained “holy grail” (a dreaded phrase), be it a single boson or a single human genome, may make the story simple, but it underplays the true ambition and delight of creating tools that make new types of science possible.
And it makes the chance of disappointment greater. More than a decade after its discovery, it is hard to argue that finding the Higgs particle has changed the world, or for that matter physics, all that much.
It is worth remembering, as Dr Higgs always knew, that what really matters in science is the process, not the prize.