Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe: The Hunt for the Higgs Boson

While the mainstream physics community celebrated the July 4, 2012 announcement that researchers at the Large Hadron Collider had found evidence for the Higgs boson, physicist Moffat not only doubts the existence of the Higgs, but also argues that extra dimensions, supersymmetry, and dark matter were invented by theoretical physicists to explain troubling problems with quantum mechanics and the standard model of particle physics. Moffat shows where modern physics has failed to solve conundrums within quantum theory and focuses on the search for the Higgs. The last remaining undetected elementary particle predicted by the standard model, the Higgs boson also creates some troubling problems with other quantum mechanical calculations. Moffat proposes the exotic “quarkonium” as a replacement for the Higgs, and argues for substituting 20th-century quantum chromodynamics with “Technicolor” particles that “would carry the quark characteristic called ‘color.’ ” He also explains how his “alternate electroweak theory” addresses many of the questions left unanswered by current models. “Physics is a brutal business,” writes Moffat, and time—along with loads of data—will tell whether his intriguing theory is able to replace currently accepted ideas in particle physics. With the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics going to Peter Higgs and François Englert, the pair who proposed the Higgs boson’s existence in the 1960s, Moffat’s theory might garner some attention. (Jan.)