Professor Peter Higgs has been awarded the the Edinburgh Award 2011. The award is organised by the City of Edinburgh Council. The recipients are nominated by the citizens of Edinburgh for their outstanding contribution to the city.
It was back in 1964 that Higgs developed the theory of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the context of particle physics. The Higgs boson is an important, but as of yet undiscovered component of the standard model of particle physics. CERN in 2011 narrowed down the possible mass of the Higgs boson and it is hoped that a proper discovery will be made this year.
The Edinburgh University news report can be found here.
Professor Higgs website can be found here.
The BBC news report can be found here.
Did he bring a small vial containing a Higgs boson to the award ceremony?
Well, it seems that professor Higgs is quite confident the Higgs boson will be found very soon.
Read what he told The Scotsman here.
The standard model and quantum gravitation both arrive massless. Both fail when mass is added. Gluts of of artificial curve fitting (26 parameters ) and hierarchies of manually inserted symmetry breakings are absurd. A founding postulate is real world defective. Parameterizing Newton into GR or Euclid into elliptic geometry is absurd.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2011/12/atlas_higgs_plot.gif
It may be 3.8 sigma above theory, but it is only 1.6 sigma above noise. How believable is the 114 GeV unparticle?
Ashtekar variables are chiral decomposition of connection one-forms of the local Lorentz group re the Immirzi parameter (arxiv:1104.1800, 1108.0816). Ashetkar torsion is simple, curvature is not (arxiv:1112.1262 ). Quantum gravitation (triangle-like anomalies, arxiv:0811.0181) requires Chern-Simons correction to Einstein-Hilbert action. Boson symmetries applied to fermionic mass fail because the vacuum is fundamentally chiral toward fermionic mass. Test the Equivalence Principle for physical chiral divergence.
Opposite shoes on a vacuum left foot locally pursue divergent minimum action vacuum free fall trajectories. Chemically and macroscopically identical, enantiomorphic atomic mass distributions violate the EP. Single crystals of alpha-quartz in space groups P3(1)21 versus P3(2)21 violate the EP. Single crystals of gamma-glycine in space groups P3(1) versus P3(2) violate the EP.
The greatest obstacle to understanding reality is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Tommy Aquinas proved God exists, at length. Baruch Spinoza disappeared God by the 16th Proposition. Physics is not a pissing contest. Galileo throttled Aristotle with observation.
@UncleAl:
Right, gauge theories are naturally massless. That is gauge symmetry requires the associated bosons to be massless. One can break gauge symmetry “by hand” adding a mass term for the gauge fields. However, you can show that such a massive boson theory is not renormalisable. This means that we cannot define the theory properly: it is “sick”.
The Higgs-Kibble mechanism allows us to break the gauge symmetry, give mass to the gauge fields and keep the theory renormalisable.
Now with gravity we think the graviton should be massless. That said people have investigated massive graviton models and models of local Lorentz symmetry breaking via Higgs-like models.