Higgs Force: Zen and the Art of Quark Dynamics

The nucleus of an atom is a collection of protons and neutrons. The protons are positively charged and the neutrons are uncharged. This means that there must be a very strong electromagnetic repulsion between the protons that is threatening to blast the nucleus apart. The only way that the stability of the nucleus can be understood is if there is a force that is holding the protons and the neutrons together that is much stronger than this electromagnetic repulsion. This incredibly powerful force is known simply as the strong force.
 

The principle architect of our understanding of the strong force and its role in the structure of matter was a physicist from New York called Murray Gell-Mann. A child prodigy who had entered Yale University in 1945 at the age of just fifteen, Gell-Mann was a great lover of the diversity of nature with an extremely wide range of passions from bird-watching to archaeology to linguistics and the arts. For a twenty year period from the early 1950s Gell-Mann led the way in elucidating the structure of matter and the mechanism behind the strong interaction that holds matter together.

Like a great go master, Gell-Mann carefully placed his stones on the board to find profound new patterns and the mysterious strong force began to reveal its secrets. Gell-Mann romantically described his scheme as ‘The Eightfold Way’, taking the name from the Buddhist path to enlightenment. He recognised the parallels with his 19th century predecessor Mendeleyev who had taken the patterns in the properties of the chemical elements and used them to organise the elements into his Periodic Table of the Elements. Mendeleyev’s discoveries led the way towards the understanding of the structure of the atom and an explanation of chemistry in terms of the properties of atoms. Gell-Mann was now undertaking an equivalent task, but at an even more fundamental level. He was aiming to discover the key to the structure of nuclear matter. Gell-Mann’s scheme implied the existence of a number of new particles. With each discovery of a missing particle the evidence for Gell-Mann’s method of organising the particles was bolstered.