Higgs Nobel bash: I was at the party of the universe

Scientists dream of a call from Stockholm. Mine came when I was vacuuming the living room. “Would you like to come to the banquet?” asked a man from the Nobel Foundation.

My heart soared. I hadn’t won a Nobel prize, but this is one award ceremony that anyone curious about the universe would enjoy.

The 2013 physics prize went to Peter Higgs and François Englert for a discovery that is about as big as it gets: working out how the building blocks of matter get their mass. In 1964, Englert, together with the late Robert Brout, predicted that this was down to an invisible field, which interacts more strongly with heavy particles than light ones. Higgs independently realised the field should have a calling card – a particle known as the Higgs boson.

The hunt that ensued ended in July 2012, when the Higgs boson was finally detected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland, and it had all the elements of the perfect story: a deep cosmic mystery, an eponymous hero, not to mention a masterful finale that captured the world’s imagination.

For me, it was also personal. Long before the Higgs had been detected, I walked inside the tunnel that now houses the LHC, treading the ground where protons would soon be smashed together at the speed of light. I felt knee-high to a grasshopper when I looked up at the detectors ATLAS and CMS, each several storeys high, that would go on to ensnare the Higgs. And of course, when the first protons set off in 2008, I was back again. Attending the Nobel ceremony was the next chapter.

Ridiculous shoes

As I arrive at the Stockholm concert hall on 10 December, I realise that this is Sweden’s Oscars – complete with crowds lining the square outside and two nude protesters at the entrance. As I find my seat on a balcony, I peer down at the balding heads of past laureates, a Who’s Who of physics and a living history of the standard model, our best theory of the universe’s particles and forces.

There is Carlo Rubbia who won the 1984 prize for discovering the W and Z particles, which carry the weak force responsible for radioactive decay. I also pick out Gerhard ‘t Hooft, who won in 1999 for taming the standard model’s unwieldy equations, and David Gross and Frank Wilczek who won in 2004 for their work on the strong force, which holds together atomic nuclei.

These minds built the standard model – but it was incomplete until the Higgs was discovered. Fittingly, I have to wait until the very end of the evening to meet Peter Higgs. He and Englert are leading a fight against the dress code: “They wanted us to wear these ridiculous shoes. François and I started a rebellion,” says Higgs. “I thought we might get thrown out.”

Famously elusive, it’s a treat to speak to Higgs in person. Though he admits that the 10 days of lectures, dinners and concerts, known as Nobel week, has been gruelling, he is enjoying the party. “I’ve been drinking too much champagne,” he frets.

Mathematical beauty

My evening isn’t just about the past though. Before I find Higgs, I am treated to a banquet at the City Hall, where I’m thrilled to be sitting with the leaders of the two teams that discovered the boson – Joe Incandela of CMS and Fabiola Gianotti of ATLAS. Since their achievement triggered the awarding of the prize to Higgs and Englert, should they have shared in the Nobel? Neither thinks so. “I was happy that it went to the theorists,” says Incandela.

Between each course, three sopranos sing an act of a specially commissioned opera. Dessert arrives in a procession featuring fire fountains and Alfred Nobel’s profile drawn in chocolate. As Abba’s I Have A Dream segues into Nessun dorma, Incandela, Gianotti and I talk about the future.

Though the Higgs is found, it hasn’t given up all its secrets. The hope is that its properties – to be investigated in more detail when the LHC switches back on in 2015 after a two-year upgrade – will reveal how to extend the standard model to include things like gravity and dark matter. One option is supersymmetry, a mathematically beautiful extension that gives each of the current particles a “superpartner”.

So far the Higgs hasn’t given many supersymmetric clues. If it does, Incandela jokes that he and Gianotti will be back at the banquet – once again celebrating another theorist winning a Nobel prize. See you there.

This article will appear in print under the headline “I was a guest at the party of the universe”