Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Carl Hagen: Spontaneous Symmetries, the Higgs Mechanism and the Nobel Prize (#080)

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

  I delighted in this remarkable opportunity to chat with Carl Hagen , a man who, as much as anyone alive was responsible for discovering the so-called Higgs Mechanism”. I found Carl fascinating and very similar to his lifelong friend and colleague, my former quantum mechanics Professor at Brown University, Gerry Guralnik. The so called “GHK Paper” co-authored by Gerry, Carl and Tom Kibble is regarded as perhaps the most important and accurate description of the mechanism by which massive particles like the electron ‘acquire’ their masses. Carl and I agree — the Nobel Prize is not the real reward — doing the science is. But nevertheless, the process by which the history of science is recorded often is by reference to those who win Nobel Prizes. This, in my opinion at least, is the most pernicious and sometimes cruel aspect of the Nobel Prizes…Let me know what you think is the best and worst aspect of the Nobel Prizes in the comments. Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here:  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Besides Brian Keating is a hypocrite and he would love to accept nothing more than a Nobel Prize if offered it, the most common criticism that I get regarding my book or some of my speeches is that I didn't actually lose the Nobel Prize. In other words, you have to win something in order to or be eligible to win something or be in a final competition like the World Series in order to lose the World Series, lose the Nobel Prize. and therefore you might have to have actually lost it in order to make a criticism of the institution itself. And I always point out, yeah, I guess that's right. We can't really criticize the president of the United States unless we ran for president of the United States

and effectively lost it. But we're not talking politics. We always avoid politics on The Into the Impossible Podcast. We are not a safe space. We are a space for academic freedom and ideas and assaying claims from, experiment from science. But I think all will agree that today's guest,

Professor Carl Hagen, not Carl Sagan, Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester, has a legitimate claim that he indeed lost the Nobel Prize. And I'm quoting from my book, Losing the Nobel Prize, the book of the same name, a section about him and my late great mentor, Dr. Jerry Guralnick, who is my professor of advanced quantum mechanics and group theory at Brown University back in the 19th

90s when I was fortunate enough to be in Jerry's class. Jerry and Carl, today's guest, worked very closely together. And Jerry was one of the sweetest people I ever knew and one of my greatest influences. As you can tell, when you read Losing the Nobel Prize, available in every format possible. And I want to read the chapter, two sections that are relevant to the guest today, which is Carl Hagen, that appear in my book. So they both appear. I always say there's three chapters in my book out of 11 chapters that deal at the Nobel Prize. I helpfully color coded them gray.

Norton, my publisher allowed me to color code them in gray in order to easily identify in case you want to skip. But I hope you won't want to skip the sections about Nobel Prize Reformation, which I call three lenses that are broken and in need of repair in order to restore a noble vision, L.E. vision. And so one of these chapters, the first one, it's chapter five, it's called Broken Lens Number 1. The Nobel Prize's credit problem. So I have this cute little thing, credit, cash, collaboration. These are the three different pillars that are broken, these lenses that are broken in need of repair to restore this noble vision. And I quote from a Nobel Prize winner, George Bernard Shaw, I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form.

could have invented the Nobel Prize. So he was always quick with a quip. And in chapter 5, I go on and I talk about Jerry Garland. Like my wonderful mensch of a teacher at Brown University taught me so much about not only group theory, which was his ostensible job, but taught me about life and what it's like to be a professor, and what it's like to aspire to greatness,

and sometimes come up short. I miss Jerry tremendously. But in the section about this is, regarding the so-called Higgs boson, which is the subject of today's guest appearance. And it revolves around the incident that's around the 2013 Nobel Prize award ceremony, which was awarded to just two of the rightful perhaps seven contestants. That means five people lost the Nobel Prize in one form or another. So I'm talking about why this is so bad and what's wrong with what happened in the 2013 Nobel Prize.

And this affected today's guest, Carl Hagen, as I'll point out. So I say, but this was not the troubling aspect of the 2013 Nobel Prize. This referring to the long elapsed time between the prize being awarded in 2013 and the prediction of the effect for which it was ostensibly awarded to Englert and Higgs. What troubled me is that the committee allows the prize to go to three scientists at most. It's another broken lens, which I will discuss in Chapter 13. Yet approximately 6,000 scientists worked on the... the two experiments, Atlas and CMS at the LHC. And even with this arbitrary limitation to three

prize winners, the prize was awarded to only two physicists, despite there being at least three other living physicists who played a significant role in the discovery. One of the overlooked physicist was Jerry Garalnik, one of my mentors at Brown University. His official job was to teach me advanced topics and quantum mechanics, but I learned much more from him. Most of all, what it takes to lead young scientists in their profession. Jerry was a brilliant scientist and immense. His paper, co-authored by Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble, appeared in the same 1964 edition of Physical Review letters as Englert and Robert Browd's paper.

Many physicists regard Gralich Hagen and Kibble's paper as at least equal to the contemporaneous papers by Englert and Brout and by Higgs. Of all the papers that could claim priority in predicting the boson, theirs was the one that truly solved the particularly vexing technical issue of the so-called unwanted goldstone boson. But Jerry never seemed bitter about losing a share of the 2013 Nobel Prize. After the award to Engler and Higgs, Jerry said,

it's a wonderful feeling of great satisfaction and amazement. We started off to solve an interesting and challenging and abstract problem. We were surprised by the answer that turned up. And that really summarizes Jerry's attitude. And from what I've learned of Carl Hagen himself, Professor Hagan, he too has this notion that the prize is secondary in importance. But I do think the prize needs to be reformed, and I plan to talk about that,

and by the time you listen to this, I will have already recorded the interview with Professor Hagan. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. From all the research I've done on him, he could not be any more impressive than he actually is, how much he's accomplished, that he still goes to work every day. This is more than 50 years.

after the publication of the paper, which rightfully should have won him the Nobel Prize. Again, he is very much alive. He should live and be well to age 120, as we say. And the last part I want to read from Chapter 13 involves the broken lens that I call the Nobel Prize's collaboration problem, which is in part about the pernicious effect of the Nobel Prize to cause collaborations, which are here to for healthy to collapse. And it's really quite a detrimental problem that collaborations and ideas which should be most kind of coming to fruition

just at the moment that they get recognized, these can sometimes collapse under the weight of university, public relations machines, media, maelstorms, and so forth. And all of this could be rectified. And all the Nobel Prize winners I've talked to, this is the one thing they all agree upon, is that it should go to more people,

And in the case of the Nobel Prize awarded to just to Brout and Englert and to Higgs, I think it easily could have been rectified to award at least all the living theorists and hopefully or in preference, my preference would have been include some of the experimentalists, maybe all the experimentalists. What law of nature, you know, prevents all the people that participated from sharing some portion of the prize monetarily and by prestige. After all, that's what happens with the Nobel Peace Prize. Thousands of people can potentially win it. That aspect of the Peace Prize has not led to any diminishment of how often it's sought out. So the collaboration problem, Broken Lens 3, says, imagine the outcry, it begins by saying, imagine the outcry of the legendary 2016 U.S. Men's Olympic 4x-200-meter freestyle Olympic team, Michael Phelps, Ryan Lockty, Conor Dweir, and Townley Haas, obliterated their competition and came in first, but only Haas, Locti, and Dwyer received medals with nothing,

not even a silver medal for Phelps. Unfair, you would say, and you'd be right. And I go in and talk about how this left out, this mechanism, which should be rightfully called, and even Peter Higgs himself would call it, the A-B-B-E-G-H-K-T-H mechanism, standing for Philip Anderson, Robert Brough, Francois Englert, Jerry Geronik, Carl Hagen, Peter Higgs, Tom Kibble, and Gerard Tehoofed, all except for Brought, we're still living in 2013.

So I'm very excited to welcome you all after this lengthy introduction. I do hope you'll pick up a copy of my book. I'll also hope and enjoin upon you to please leave a review of the podcast on Apple iTunes or subscribe on Apple iTunes, leave a rating and review so we can get more great guests. We have some Nobel Prize winners coming up in the very near future

on The Into the Impossible podcast. And I'll be sharing some more stories from the book and some of the adventures as this Nobel Annunciation season, as I call it, comes to the forefront. So I hope you'll enjoy the ride and stay tuned. It's pretty wild.

It culminates on Coronation Day, which is December 10th, not Alfred Nobel's birthday the day he died way back 1896. And that's when the Nobel Prizes are awarded each year. It's a national holiday. I'm kind of curious if the Nobel Prizes will even be awarded this year in person due to COVID. Sweden has had a different approach, shall we say, from the rest of the Western Hemisphere in Europe with regard to COVID. We'll see what happens.

Leave your comments. Do you think in the chat below? Do you think there'll be an in-person Nobel Prize ceremony this year on December 10th, Alfred Nobel's death day? It would be unprecedented, but these are unprecedented times. Thank you so much for bearing with me in this long-winded introduction to a most remarkable individual, and I just want to take great advantage of his time because he's such a special, special treasure, a living legend, Dr. Carl Hagan. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable.

from magic. It is such a thrill, such a treat to be speaking with none other than Professor C.R. Carl Richard or Dick Hayden, who is born on the 2nd of February, 1937. He's a professor of physics at the University of Rochester. He's noted for many, many contributions, including fundamental contributions to the standard model of particle physics and the discovery of a mechanism related to spontaneous asymmetry breaking, conventionally known as the Higgs mechanism, but we're going to get into that because I think it's incredibly important

issues of collaboration and issues of attribution within all of science, but in particular in the work that was done in this field that's so near and dear to my heart. So he's had so many awards. I can't even list all the things he's worked on, and I think I'll need another podcast with you, Dick, to discuss things like the Aaronoff,

Bome Effect, the Cherin-Simon's work that you've done. But to begin with, I wanted to say that you've got your PhD, your master's, and your bachelor's from MIT. And at MIT, your doctoral thesis was in quantum lecture dynamics. You've been at University of Rochester since 1963. I understand you go in there all the time. You won an award for excellence in teaching. You've won many honorary doctorates from different institutions, referee, outstanding referee, from the American Physical Society, winner of a Sackari Prize, the APS Fellow Award, just such an outstanding list of contributions.

We need three podcasts to introduce you fully. How are you doing today, Dick? I'm doing pretty well, considering the climate out there, the pandemic and increasing age, which slows me down a bit. But all things, I guess I'm doing okay. So I wrote about you. I've known about you, of course, my whole professional career, and I studied under none other than your close friend for many, many decades.

And I remember our mutual friend, Jerry Garalnik, speaking so highly of you. As I write in my book, losing the Nobel Prize about this invention that is known as the Higgs mechanism, the Higgs boson, but that Higgs himself, allegedly, Peter Higgs, calls it the A-B-E-G-H-H-H-K- apostrophes. TH mechanism standing for Bill of Anderson, Robert Brout, Francois Englert, Jerry Garalnik, Carl Hagan, Peter Higgs, Tom Kibble, and Gerald Tooft. All except for Brout, I write.

We're living in the year 2013 when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Higgs and Anglert. And we'll certainly get into that. But before we do, I want to take you back a little bit farther in time than 2013 and take you back to your childhood, one of your friends.

We were discussing before we started recording that I'm sort of related to you in a way, maybe influential, through your friendship with one of the greatest scientists that I ever knew and greatest teachers that I ever knew. And that's Jerry Garalmi. And it says here that, and this is a book by Ian Sample, I'm holding it up called Massive, The Hunt for the God Particle. And on page 60 of this wonderful book, we talk about the difference in Jerry's life. and you come into the story, he talks about meeting you in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

a group of physicists was circling around the same problem that Higgs Brought and Englert were already working on. None knew what the others were up to, or even that they were in competition, for what became one of the greatest prizes in modern physics. As undergraduates, Jerry Garalick and Dick Hagen were inseparable. Garalick went to Harvard while Hagen went to MIT, but the two institutions here at lectures that they both attended. The two were awestruck by Julian Schwinger, the Harvard physicist whose work shaped quantum electrodynamics in the 40s. When Schwinger arrived for a lecture, he started writing down equations at the top left corner of the board and kept writing until he reached the bottom right, at which point he stopped,

quietly strolled out of the room, and left. His lectures seemed impenetrable at first, but persevere and the man's genius was clear. And I think the friendship is what I first want to get into. How did you and Jerry meet? I've never, fully understood the actual meeting between the two of you guys that was so momentous for physics and for you personally. Yes, well, we both went to MIT as undergrads, and he's from Iowa, and I was from the city of Chicago. And at MIT, you're all mixed in with every other major and so forth your first year, and it's only as a sophomore you get to meet your fellow would-be physicist. And Jerry sometimes reminded me the way he became aware of me was we were in our sophomore E&M class.

And according to him, anyway, I was bitching to the professor about something or other that he'd not giving me credit for and so forth. And he formed maybe some adverse opinion about me, but nonetheless, we made a connection and just grew and stayed like Topsy. It just grew. So we've been tells ever since. When we finished our bachelor's degree, yes, he went to Harvard.

I stayed at MIT. I guess I'm a creature of that, but I like the things that I'm familiar with, so that was familiar to me. But that didn't end it. We went to Shun, as you remark. And since I mentioned about the

alongular relation between us, I'll also I could remark that I'm a grandchild of Schwinger because his student Johnson was my advisor at MIT. But, okay, so anyway, we continued our association. We went to the Schwinger lectures religiously. And we sampled the social scene there in Cambridge, waiting stances, and all that stuff. He went to London, and so I went to Rochester. And so how did I end up in London?

Well, I did a paper at that time, which I gave a catchy title to. elementary particles as elementary particles. It sounds kind of redundant, but it was sort of a play on the work of Jeffrey Chu. And he was, of course, popularizing the bootstrap theory. Nothing was more fundamental than anything else, just they brought each other into existence and so forth. And I didn't get particularly attracted by that point of view.

So I did this paper, elementary particles, that'll meant to particles. And the preprint got a little bit of tension at Imperial College, where Jerry was. And no doubt he says, and I'm well, he's my old pal, and you can get him to come here on the chief. So why not do that? So I went to London, and I actually stayed with the Goronix there, and there, a nice little pad in Hempstead. And, well, that was good. We drove into work every day and twice a versa

and had plenty of time to talk about the things that we were dealing with. Yeah, and you mentioned Swinger, and I think it was pretty interesting, maybe a little bit of foreshadowing as sample writes in Massif. He said, tensions over credit run particularly high when the work in question is worthy of a Nobel Prize.

And I should stop and say, you know, my friend Eric Weinstein and I have talked about this. There are certain awards where the Nobel Prize gives, kind of confers upon the recipient, a sort of aura and honor. And then there are prizes like this award that you participated so crucially and inextricably with that I think give prestige to the prize. And I think a similar event happened with Schwinger and Feynman and Tomonga. And he writes about that in the books Massives sample. He says, Stephen Weinberg said it was a pity.

The Nobel Committee failed to award Freeman Dice in the prize for his contribution to sorting out quantum electrodynamics in the 1940s. And of course, you know, I knew Freeman very well. He would come here in the winters, in the Princeton Winters, to escape those, rather. and he would come. He was a member of the Jasons that met here in San Diego, and La Jolla. And he never seemed bitter about it,

but it was the kind of thing that he almost felt like, at one point I felt like he said maybe something to the effect that he was glad he never got it, because now everybody asked him, how does it feel not to win a Nobel Prize? And I think, you know, as I said, the contributions that you made are so inextricable to this. I want to take it back.

How does an idea, like the mechanism that you conceived of, which in many ways, you know, it's always, they say, better to have a third party praise you. So you don't really know me. This is the first time we're meeting, but I'm going to praise you and say that the contributions that you and Jerry and Tom Kibble made are perceived by many, many people, physicists among them, myself included, as being superior in a way because it avoided unwanted features. So first, can we take a step back? What inspired you to come up with this GHK mechanism? What was the collaboration like between the three of you? And was it a case of a lone genius among you or the three geniuses working together that just inspiration came?

What prompted you, Dick, to come up with this phenomenal, fantastic mechanism that underpins all of modern physics? Yes. Well, Mary had been involved in this before I arrived. and he was thinking about it. And there's a paper he did, and not to embarrass him, but he said, well, this paper was, at least subsequently said this paper was wrong.

So he's still struggling with this. And so it was on his agenda list. And I arrived, and we started talking about it from the get-go. and it went on and on. And at the point of which Kibble joined is a bit vague in my recollection now, but he came in and he's a very smart, deep guy, and certainly contributed to the project.

And there's one thing which, was very significant. I see you smiling, maybe you know what I'm talking to get to, because it was just as we were about to mail off our paper to FISRA letters, Tom comes in and says, oh look, I've just found these two papers by Brown and Englard and Higgs and so forth. And in the spirit of being an honest researcher, yes, we've, said we should include them. Now, I wouldn't have had any regrets if we got the thing off

before time came in with these papers, but that's the history of it. And that act dogged the whole politics of the symmetry breaking mechanism for 50 years. So there's that aspect of it, which has a little bit of unpleasantness in my memory. But so being, as they say now, it is what it is. Yes, it is. And I think, like my friend Freeman, and I don't know if you ever got to know Freeman, but he would be the type, you know, as I felt with Jerry and you and Tom, that the prize would benefit from the prestige of having awarded it to you.

We'll get into the politics of these things in just a little bit. But I think I want to make a couple of points for experts out there. We have a lot of physicists that listen to this podcast. We've had five Nobel laureates on the podcast. They all listen to it. And we have just the best and brightest. You don't have to be a Nobel Prize winner to come on the show, as I prove all the time. But I want to point out some things for the experts, because we have an awful lot of them.

and that why, in my mind, the worst thing that the Nobel Prize can do is rewrite history. And in fact, I think it does that a lot. And it does it in a way that's very pernicious to the public's understanding and appreciation of science. To the extent that this public knows about science, they might know about Neil deGrasse Tyson or somebody like this, or Einstein sitting above you in the back of your office there. But they won't, and they know about the Nobel Prize. But beyond that, they really don't know that much. So there's a lot of pressure on Neil deGrasse Tyson or the late great Stephen Hawking, for example, had the same pressure.

But the Nobel Prize Committee has this pressure every year, and I think that they often don't live up to it. And I'm speaking about this attribute that even the Nobel Prize winners I've had on my show have recognized as a serious lacuna in the prize. And that's the way that it apportions credit and it rewrites history. And so, first of all, I want to point out why the, why we're not, no one's saying that Higgs didn't deserve, you know, accolades and attention. But I think to point out the fact, some of these facts that your paper, which I'm going to call GHK, is considered by most physicists. And I'm an experimentalist. I'm just a simple experimentalist, but, but I've studied it. And my fellow theorists tell me this, that the paper that you wrote is the most complete one. And even though it was published a few weeks later, as you say, it was due to the fact that you were acting as good scholars and that you were being intellectually rigorous and acting with academic ethics.

You were acting in an ethical fashion. So that's one thing. You guys had a massless boson and it showed how the goldstone theorem, you know, certainly was not complete and in the sense was a failure. Maybe we can talk about this. So Brout and Englert don't have this boson. But can you talk about the goldstone and the massless boson? And why is that so important to your mechanism? Well, there's the massless boson, which is predicted by the goldstone theorem,

which was the big problem and how to get rid of it. There's a other thing that in the model that we all considered, you take the four degrees of freedom, which are two pairs. And you combine it in such a way that three of them go together to give a massive particle, and you have this other one left over. And we didn't put in an explicit mass term to, and that would have been a great thing if we had said it's important. But that to us was not the important thing. The important thing was showing that the massless gauge,

boson, you could absorb this other one and become a mass if vector meson. So that's what we tried to do, and we missed a point there, regrettably, but it was not the important point in our view of it. And then the other thing that's kind of interesting is that from the history in this book and in other books about the same subject, it was clear that Higgs himself didn't have the boson until Nambu said to basically put it in there. And Nambu, famous Nambu, I forget his first name, but he was the referee, I believe the lower goes of Higgs's paper, right? So it was sort of like your teacher correcting the homework in some sense. Again, we're not casting aspersions on anything that Higgs did, but, you know, the question of how this same mechanism comes to be attributed to the name of a person. You know, some people, it could be the Nambu boson, which I guess he already has his own boson. Well, when the time comes for me to discourse on why it's called the Higgs boson, I have something to say.

So let's do that then. Let's talk about why it is it called that? because I think it's caused more harm than almost any other thing named in physics. But please go on. Okay, well, we had a conference here in Rochester, Particle Physics, the fellow who ran Rochester Particle Physics was Bob Marchak, and he was a great conference organizer. And so he had this conference, and he invited a lot of good people.

And one of the people that came was Ben Lee. And Ben Lee was the guy who referred to it as the pig's boson, and he made history. That's the way it's been ever since. And so unfortunately, but that is the history of it. And when we look at the kind of way that way that kind of way that Jerry would always tell me, and he would just say it as an aside, this is in the 90s, so this is decade before, decades before the actual award. It was decades before the, you know,

large Hadron Collider was even constructed. And he used to say, even back then, that the most important, you know, relations to learn in physics are public relations, and that, you know, he always suspected that there was a lot of forces working on behalf of, you know, he always suspected that, that there was a lot of forces working on behalf of Peter Higgs to tell a story. And I always say to my students, you know, it's almost as important in terms of succeeding in physics to know how to present your research, to present your findings, which also requires that you know the history of your field. I don't know about your students, but a lot of my students are, they don't have a good grasp of the history of physics. It's not how we teach things. Instead, we tend to teach things in the following way.

There was this problem. Then Einstein came along and fixed it. And then he won a Nobel Prize for this. Feynman had a solution to this problem. Willcheck and others had the solution to this problem, and they fixed it. And they won a Nobel Prize. I call it, you know, pedagogy by prize. And I think that's endemic. I don't know, you know, why we have this fascination with the Nobel Prize. But it was clear to Jerry that having not been as savvy politically and public relations-wise, I think he felt that hurt him. Going back to the 60s when we were working on this, the phrase Nobel Prize never once crossed our discussions. It was just something we were dimly aware of it. And I don't think we really grasped at the time the... ultimate import of all this.

Yes, we knew that people were working on. There's an important people were working on it. So it must be something good in it. So we could do something good and maybe enhance our careers by working on it as well. But the Nobel Prize, it was just something out there in the way, and it just did not figure into our reckonings at all. And it was only decades later, from my perspective anyway, that this even evolved into an issue. Or maybe Jerry was thinking about this almost as soon as we finished the project.

But to me, no, I was just a project. It was good. And what's the next thing to work on? Yeah, that's Maria Mayer behind my shoulder over here. She was at UCSD when she won the ninth. 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics, and she said, I don't really care so much. It was more fun doing the physics than winning the prize. But of course, prizes are important. They play a role in establishing priorities in physics, in departments, even in countries. And I wonder, did you ever notice a kind of pressure not only coming from, say, Edinburgh, where Higgs was, I believe, but beyond to all of Europe and basically to sort of try to frame the Higgs with that name, especially for the prestige of European physics at perhaps the expense of American physics. What do you make of that? Is that a real phenomenon? Are I just

being paranoid as an American? Well, I'm being paranoid as a practitioner, but I heard things that this was going on. And I think, I hope I'm not misstating it here, but I think, I think, I think I heard that Tuft was one of the leaders in saying, this has got to be a European prize. So we recognize that there were certain forces against us. Another thing I'm not sure of, but I was told by Jerry that Edinburgh had a person who was just employed to help Peter Higgs on his way.

So, you know, there are these forces, which we didn't have available to us, but we knew that they were out there. There are all these kind of very large spreads coming out of CERN nowadays as they're advocating for newer and some say more expensive and vaster collider experiments.

Maybe we can talk about that right now as we talk about what's to come in particle physics. Do you see what some have noted in, in physics today is sort of a drought since the discoveries that you participated in in the 60s, the great work in the 70s in theoretical particle physics, and somehow much less coming out that's new and original. I mean, the Higgs is certainly the biggest discovery. Of course, there are many experimental discoveries in the 80s, Rubia and others, and in quark physics, Letterman, and others. But in terms of new and original physics, do you feel, as some say, there's been almost a drought in new fundamental particle physics ideas that can be tested by new and larger and more expensive particle accelerators?

Well, I'm not an experimentalist, and I'm not even a phenomenologist, whatever that is. But so I've been once or twice removed from all these details of advancement in the world of experimental particle physics. I haven't been pulled over by any breakthrough in theoretical physics that appeals to my sense of what the universe should be like. So I share the view that, yes, there's been sort of a dart of progress in this field, so regrettably. And my short-sightedness is possibly to blame and my increasing age and removal from the scene of active work on this. And are there sorts of parallels in the sense? sense that it might be a very exciting time. I mean, I'm curious on your perspective on things like string theory or theories of everything for the simple fact that, you know, there's been a lot of

interest lately in new, new and improved, you know, theories of everything. And I think I'd like to know from you, what do you think people are so interested? And why do you think this particle, which, you know, as Ian Sample calls it, the God particle, Leon Letterman called it that. But I think, I think there's a backstory behind the name the God particle. Can you explain how it got that name and then I have a follow-up after that? Well, I don't know any great detail about the origin of the name, but when Letterman came out with that, I was, please.

I mean, it seemed like a bit of excessive public relations, but nonetheless, it was good. It was always good to say, to think anyway. that I had some kind of hand in the addition of the god particle to the elementary particle zoo. And I don't have any particular horse I wanted back in the subsequent realm, the string theory. Well, I never got into it. One, I guess the backing for it always seemed to be a bit strange to me. And I didn't have the deep mathematics that was required in order to contribute to this in a meaningful way.

So I just sort of took the attitude that, well, let it come forth, show us what it can do. And there are other physicists of note who have said, yeah, predict something. And I've been dating, and there it is. It's laid fallow and, you see, whether it's part of the particle physics theory of 50 years from now. I'm skeptical, but I have nothing to lose if it is. Some say that he named it that, Letterman, named it that because he, He actually intended to call it the God D-A-M-N particle because it sort of had these very bizarre and mysterious properties.

In what sense is the Higgs a unique kind of notion? What makes it in this particle and this mechanism so unique and interesting and why has it the effect that you came up with and devised, invented, has such persistence? And then I want to ask you, actually, you don't have to answer that question. Let me ask you a first question, Dick. I'm sorry to interrupt. But what is, in your mind, is something like your mechanism?

Is that created? Is that discovered? You know, we say about mathematics, I've had Jim Simons on the podcast, an eminent mathematician, scientist, and he believes math is both invented and discovered. But what about a theoretical idea in physics? Well, is it made or is it discovered? Well, it had to be there. It's the theories of elementary particles, gauge theories of elementary particles, they foundered on the issue of mass. And it was a killing problem that confronted us and had to be discovered.

And fortunately, the mathematics allowed for the insertion of the ideas. that we came up with and it emerged. Now, we did one particular model, simplest model, the one that all of us have done, and there might have been more complicated models, and no doubt a lot of them have been used in subsequent years, but a lot of us think physics is basically simple and should be elucidated by discovering things in very simple models.

And okay, it was, I think. So that's how it came to pass and my view of it, I guess. And what do you make of the kind of the extremely long period of time that it took between prediction by you and your colleagues and friends to discovery? we often hear things like trust the science and trust scientists, et cetera. But what happens when it takes 50, what, 56 years or something like that between prediction and discovery? How do you persevere for such a long period of time with confidence or were you nervous? How did you possibly handle that pressure for decades and decades?

Well, to be quite honest, it was not something that I thought about at all. Something which I look back upon is an interesting productive physics problem, which Jerry and I were done. Was there going to be an ultimate truth of what we had done? And I guess as you remarked a bit back, the LHC came along. and made all this possible. And then people started thinking that, okay, we could find the scalar boson. I don't call it to Higgs, but scalar boson. I'll start doing that, too, actually.

Then there was all this talk of Nobel Prize. And, okay, that's great. We started counting up to six, and the arithmetic wasn't working out for us. So that wasn't too promising. Right. And I would be remiss if I didn't ask you if there was a Hagen Prize. For all I know, maybe there is one,

or there will be one. You've won so many accolades and awards. But let's say you were devising a prize that had the same goals abstractly that Alfred Nobel had, which is to recognize contributions by science to the betterment of all mankind, as he put it. How would you change the rules? What differences would you make, or are they fine just as is?

Well, the rules aren't fine the way they are. From my perspective, it would have to be certain changes in who's eligible, how many are eligible, and so forth. But I think Nobel's original charge is something that I would be hard pressed to improve upon. And I am always reluctant to try to force people in a certain direction that appeals to my particular sense of order by saying, oh, here is this big prize you'll get if you show what I'm thinking about is correct. So, no, if there could be a Nobel Prize prime or something like that, that would be the route that I would advocate. And again, with the slackening of the rules, it shouldn't be one, two, or three, or four, five, six.

and how do you recognize things which are these huge collaborations which you can relate to even better than I? So, yeah, the issue of how you bring those into the fold would have to be carefully thought out. And that's not something which I have done and no one's asking you to it. That's where we are. Well, that certainly comports with what many of my colleagues and friends say as well. I resonate with what you're saying. I want to finish up in the last few minutes by asking you some questions about your philosophy and the meaning of life as a physicist, at least, from a perspective of a great career, a long career.

I wish you even longer in this practice. You won a teaching award for outstanding teaching, not that long. long ago. I want to ask you, what is it about teaching that you love? Is there something that particularly appeals to you about teaching itself? Well, I think it's the interaction with the students that I enjoy so much. And for the last couple decades, I've been teaching a course in undergraduate quantum mechanics, upper level. And I had a certain amount of fame in the department for my difficult problems I gave. I mean, they weren't beyond their camp, but they taxed them to the utmost.

And the students liked that. And it was a great part of my teaching career. And the thing is, now that has been made more difficult because of the pandemic. and actually it caused me to decide I'm going to retire now. I'm not into this. And if I can't interact to the students except remotely or with a mask, it's not something I can profit in the continuum. So the department put its resources into someone who is more amenable to that new style of teaching.

Yeah. It's very challenging. And I, you know, I'm not particularly optimistic. I'm generally an optimistic person, but I'm not terribly optimistic about this, finding a cure, et cetera. And certainly you should take care of your health. You're in an older age bracket, obviously, and being exposed to students could come with some risk. So, but you've had a very legendary career.

I want to take you back to your earliest, you know, kind of a love of physics. inspired you about physics and in particular theoretical physics. What is it about it that is so captivating to you that sustained such a, you know, six-decade long career? Well, let me begin at a rather mundane level. I went to MIT. I thought it was going to be an electrical engineer. I didn't even know that people studied physics as a full-time career. So when you get to, you guys, there they divide you up into sections like 30 sections there so you're in with a whole bunch of other intended majors and so during the course of that year I interacted with them and examine where my successes were and I said to myself hey look all the smart people are doing

physics and I think I've done as well as they have so maybe I should do that too now that's a heck of a reason, but I did go into physics in my sophomore year and met Jerry and so forth. And why theoretical physics? I was never a tinkerer. I didn't build radios or anything like that. And I like the mathematics. So where else am I going to go? theoretical physics is something which has a lot of appeal and it's been good to me and i've had a full life i guess yeah what today if you were starting out again and you uh magically took a pill uh the hagen pill or whatever and it transported you back in time uh to a younger age but in this day in 2020 so it kept you in time i should say uh what is the most mysterious

aspect of science, physics, astronomy, or maybe biology, what fascinates you most that you would most like to start your career on, if you could, from a pure intellectual curiosity standpoint? Well, I've thought of that, and what would I do if I were coming of maturity now? Yes. And one of the things that I would probably be carefully considering is economics. And it's a field which gives vent to my interest in mathematics. And it's very influential in forming our view of the world right now. So, no, I probably would not be a scientist, but you never know.

And then I just want to finish up with, if a question I ask, many people have come on the show, as you may or may not know, the title of my show is called The Into the Impossible podcast, which is a quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark, who said the only way to find out what is possible. is to venture beyond the limits of the possible into the impossible. He also said that for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And the last thing he is kind of known for is, of course, the movie 2001, a space odyssey, the book that was the underpinning of that particular film. And in that film, I don't know, have you seen the film 2001 A Space Odyssey by Kubrick? Yeah, I am. So there's this picture and there's this scene, several.

scenes with this enormous monolith, this enormous black obelisk-looking thing, where you have, in the opening scenes, you have these primates in Africa two million years ago throwing up a bone, and then it turns into this obelisk, and then eventually the obelisk is also on the moon. And the obelisk to Clark was sort of representative of a time capsule put by an ancient alien civilization with the hopes that it would be discovered at the right time by human beings, and that human beings would learn from this time capsule. I want to ask you, Feynman once said, you know, if he could summarize all of physics, he would say that everything is made of atoms and atoms obey the laws of quantum mechanics.

What would you put on a time capsule, Dick, if you knew it would last for a billion years, what statement or phrase or piece of wisdom or equation would you put on such a billion-year-long lasting time capsule? Well, I like what you quoted of Feynman. Everything's made of Adams and so forth. But it could also be appended to that, then it's made of quarks. And what's beyond the quarks? And don't stop looking because our history is such that there's always something beyond. Don't stop looking is perhaps one of the best pieces of advice.

I could ever get. I'm so glad I got the chance to talk to you, Dick. It's been a fascinating treat, a true honor for me. You like my late great mentor, Jerry Garalnik, are true menses, just ultimate kind of role models for physicists like me and young and old. And I want to thank you so much for setting this up and for making, taking time out of your schedule. I wish you good health, much success, and perhaps you'll win a Nobel Prize in economics. Who knows? Okay. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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