Truth Awaits

I have been meaning to write a note in memory of Peter Ware Higgs who passed away in April. My surname is his middle name, and that is pure coincidence, no family connection except maybe half way back to Eve. Higgs predicted the existence of the Higgs boson (the God Particle) in 1964, the year I finished university. Back then I was busy starting a family and a career, and bosons went unnoticed. Now that I have some time to spare, I am wondering what all that was about.

Indulge me for a moment while I reflect on a book I am reading, "Waves in An Impossible Sea: how everyday life emerges from the cosmic ocean". The author, Matt Strassler, has set out to make the Higgs Field (an obscure aspect of cosmology responsible for mass) accessible to fools like me. By the end of chapter five, I am not convinced he will succeed. However, I notice the parallel between his surprisingly lucid explanations and my own thoughts about the origins of meaning.

Because we experience the physical world through limited senses and imperfect thinking, we want to keep things simple. If we look closer, we find things are not so simple. So it is with mass which is experienced, for example, as the difference in weight of an apple and a watermelon. Simple. 

Strassler explains how to look closer, that what we mean by the word mass is actually three distinct things: gravitational mass, inertial mass, and rest mass. They are different as shown by the fact that a photon has gravitational and inertial mass but no rest mass. That their names share the word mass may betray a family connection going back to the beginning of everything. 

Have I lost you? If so, you'll have to read the book. I'll race you... slowly. The faster we go, the heavier it gets. (That's a joke about relativity.)

Meanwhile, where does meaning come from and how sure can we be that we understand? To make it simple, meaning comes from limited experiences through abstraction and analogy, attending to relevant similarities and ignoring what seems unimportant. As we gather experience, on closer examination, what seemed irrelevant becomes important. Heaven and earth are reimagined as a universe united by gravity, and I am assured that if I keep reading, mass will emerge from the Higgs Field. 

Maybe we shouldn't worry about the Higgs field, but it shows so clearly how we trust our simple ideas until we find them inadequate.

Understanding progresses...
slowly,
while truth awaits.

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The Higgs Boson's Most Captivating Puzzle Still Remains: Big Think
Don't read this. You and I don't think that big. I'm going to try chapter 6 of "Waves in an Impossible Sea". Wish me luck.