Higgs Boson Biography
Higgs was born and raised in the small town of Bideford in
North Devon, England. His parents separated when he was just 4 years old.
Higgs started playing the piano at the age of 8 and studied
the instrument classically while still at school. At the age of fourteen he
became a rock drummer, playing mainly original material in local bands. The
most notable of these was Helter Skelter, a band managed by Will Palin, former
sound engineer to David Bowie and subsequent tour manager to Chris de Burgh.
Higgs says that among his favourite bands at that time were Yes, Frank Zappa,
Genesis, Wishbone Ash, Led Zeppelin, The Who, and Deep Purple. The usual
influences for the typical teenager musician in the 70’s.
His first introduction to contemporary jazz influenced
music, music that wasn’t based on relatively simple chord structures, happened
whilst at a friend’s house. The radio was playing a track by Steely Dan
entitled ‘Don’t Take Me Alive’ from the album ‘Royal Scam’ (according to Higgs,
still a favourite) –. Obviously some classical music and early 70’s rock had an
effect on Higgs but hearing Steely Dan for the first time was clearly a
profound experience. This eventually led him to less mainstream albums such as
Bill Brufords ‘One of a Kind’ and great musician-technicians like Allan
Holdsworth.
At the age of 21, still a drummer Higgs headed for London.
It wasn't until he was asked to play in a jazz trio that his interest in the
piano was rekindled and spent the next 5 years fanatically pursuing knowledge
of his newfound love - Jazz. Higgs studied under Malcolm Cliff, a jazz pianist
on the London circuit, and big band arranger Ian Gardner and for a short while
the virtuoso jazz pianist Peter Sander.
Higgs spent a number of years playing solo modern jazz piano
in clubs and restaurants in and around London while developing his own unique
musical style. His early compositions drew heavily on his mid to late 70’s
influences, Chic Corea, Holdsworth, Steely Dan, John McLaughlin, Brand X and
even Pete Barden’s Camel.
In 1986 Higgs moved back to his native Devon to focus on
more writing. Since then he has worked in a number of musical situations. He
wrote and produced a demo that was immediately taken up by Elysium Records
which was to involve Elton John’s producer Gus Dudgeon (‘Goodbye Yellow Brick
Road’ ‘Captain Fantastic’etc.). Gus had agreed to produce the album, on the
strength of the demo. Sadly Gus and his wife Sheila were tragically killed in a
car accident.
Moving on from that experience, Higgs’ material developed in
complexity. He then produced a self-named CD album which received excellent
reviews from the British music press and was featured on Humphrey Littleton's
"Best of Jazz on Record" show on BBC Radio 2.
The three track demo which included the tracks Penumbra,
Synthetic Spring and Neptune, produced by Gareth Young, was sent to Dave
Stewart (the keyboard player on Bill Brufords ‘One of a Kind’ album. Dave
phoned Higgs and praised the demo to such an extent that it encouraged Higgs to
carry on with the project.
The CD album Higgs released has now received high praise
from Alphonse Mouzon, Tony Levin and a number of other high-ranking jazz
notables.
Higgs boson-like particle
discovery claimed at LHC
By Paul
Rincon Science editor, BBC News website, Geneva
The
moment when Cern director Rolf Heuer confirmed the Higgs results
Related Stories
Cern
scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the
discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The particle
has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass.
Both of
the Higgs boson-hunting experiments at the LHC see a level of certainty in
their data worthy of a "discovery".
More work
will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however.
Prof
Stephen Hawking tells the BBC's Pallab Ghosh the discovery has cost him $100
The
results announced at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research),
home of the LHC in Geneva, were met with loud applause and cheering.
Prof
Peter Higgs, after whom the particle is named, wiped a tear from his eye as the
teams finished their presentations in the Cern auditorium.
"I
would like to add my congratulations to everyone involved in this
achievement," he added later.
"It's
really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime."
Prof
Stephen Hawking joined in with an opinion on a topic often discussed in hushed
tones.
"This
is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize," he
told BBC News.
"But
it is a pity in a way because the great advances in physics have come from
experiments that gave results we didn't expect."
'Dramatic'
The CMS
team claimed they had seen a "bump" in their data corresponding to a
particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 133 times heavier
than the protons that lie at the heart of every atom.
The BBC's
George Alagiah explains the Higgs boson
They
claimed that by combining two data sets, they had attained a confidence level
just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance
that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.
However,
a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma -
a one-in-two million chance.
Prof Joe
Incandela, spokesman for the CMS, was unequivocal: "The results are
preliminary but the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is
dramatic. This is indeed a new particle," he told the Geneva meeting.
Atlas
results were even more promising, at a slightly higher mass: "We observe
in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the
mass region around 126 GeV," said Dr Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the
Atlas experiment at the LHC.
Peter Higgs joined three of the
six theoreticians who first predicted the Higgs at the conference
Prof Rolf
Heuer, director-general of Cern, commented: "As a layman I would now say I
think we have it."
"We
have a discovery - we have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs
boson. But which one? That remains open.
"It
is a historic milestone but it is only the beginning."
Commenting
on the emotions of the scientists involved in the discovery, Prof Incandela
said: "It didn't really hit me emotionally until today because we have to
be so focussed… but I'm super-proud."
Dr
Gianotti echoed Prof Incandela's thoughts, adding: "The last few days have
been extremely intense, full of work, lots of emotions."
A
confirmation that this is the Higgs boson would be one of the biggest
scientific discoveries of the century; the hunt for the Higgs has been compared
by some physicists to the Apollo programme that reached the Moon in the 1960s.
Statistics of a 'discovery'
- Particle physics has an accepted definition for a "discovery": a five-sigma level of certainty
- The number of standard deviations, or sigmas, is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance, in the absence of a real effect
- Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a "loaded" coin
- The "three sigma" level represents about the same likelihood of tossing nine heads in a row
- Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 21 in a row
- Unlikely results are more probable when several experiments are carried out at once - equivalent to several people flipping coins at the same time
- With independent confirmation by other experiments, five-sigma findings become accepted discoveries
Scientists
would then have to assess whether the particle they see behaves like the
version of the Higgs particle predicted by the Standard Model, the current best
theory to explain how the Universe works. However, it might also be something
more exotic.
All the
matter we can see appears to comprise just 4% of the Universe, the rest being
made up by mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
A more
exotic version of the Higgs could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the
Universe that remains obscure.
Scientists
will have to look at how the Higgs decays - or transforms - into other, more
stable particles after being produced in collisions at the LHC.
Dr Pippa
Wells, a member of the Atlas experiment, said that several of the decay paths
already showed deviations from what one would expect of the Standard Model
Higgs.
For
example, a decay path where the Higgs transforms into two photon particles was
"a bit on the high side", she explained.
These
could get back into line as more statistics are added, but on the other hand,
they may not.
"We're
reaching into the fabric of the Universe at a level we've never done
before," said Prof Incandela.
"We're
on the frontier now, on the edge of a new exploration. This could be the only
part of the story that's left, or we could open a whole new realm of
discovery."
The Standard Model and the Higgs boson
• The
Standard Model is the simplest set of ingredients - elementary particles -
needed to make up the world we see in the heavens and in the laboratory
• Quarks
combine together to make, for example, the proton and neutron - which make up
the nuclei of atoms today - though more exotic combinations were around in the
Universe's early days
•
Leptons come in charged and uncharged versions; electrons - the most
familiar charged lepton - together with quarks make up all the matter we can
see; the uncharged leptons are neutrinos, which rarely interact with matter
• The
"force carriers" are particles whose movements are observed as
familiar forces such as those behind electricity and ligAht (electromagnetism)
and radioactive decay (the weak nuclear force)
• The
Higgs boson came about because although the Standard Model holds together
neatly, nothing requires the particles to have mass; for a fuller theory, the
Higgs - or something else - must fill in that gap.
Rest of
all coming soon...............
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