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    That “aha” moment and the excitement of study

    Higgs Boson - the God particleOn 13 December 2011 the possible discovery of the Higgs Boson particle was announced to the world:  you may well have taken note, I was a little caught up with the last two days of term.

    What is the story about this and why mention it at the beginning of the school year? The story encapsulates the delights and excitement of academic study, of why people sit poring over books, computer sand microscopes, pick up paint brushes, rehearse for hours on the piano or the stage – it is that sense of wonder and discovery that comes from making sense of the world – that “aha” moment or that moment of complete absorption in a task, identified as the experience of flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

    It is indeed what I hope our students experience, from time to time, both in their lessons and in their private study – that, “Wow, this is amazing!”

    So what of this big story that broke just before the holidays? The following explanation is taken from The Economist Christmas issue which I hope I have understood sufficiently well to have drawn out the key elements for this article.

    The wonder of physics, the article states, is to ask a question so obvious no one else would have thought of posing it. For example, why do apples fall to ground? Newton had the originality not only to ask this question, but also the brains to work out the answer, and along comes the theory of gravity.

    In the 1960s a group of young researchers at Edinburgh University asked themselves where mass came from. They calculated that the reason why fundamental particles have mass is their interaction with a previously unknown field that permeates space which has since been named the Higgs field. This theory explains what is left over after a phenomenon called electroweak symmetry breaking: this activity, according to mathematical calculations, leaves a putative particle which has been labelled the Higgs Boson, whose possible discovery was announced last month.

    Using the multibillion dollar Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the world’s premier particle physics laboratory, scientists have sought to locate and identify this particle. Having worked on this for many years, the scientists believed they had enough information to be able to release their news to the world in December.

    Confirmation of the discovery would allow physicists to move into the exploration of something called Supersymmetry, which predicts the existence of a further set of particles. The CERN scientists believe these may be light enough to be made in the LHC; exploration of this would lead further in our understanding of the universe, this time into the world of the mysterious “dark matter” whose gravity holds the very galaxies together.

    The Higgs Boson particle is also called the God particle (as a result of an editorial slip of the hand rather than theological input), but this has stuck as we come to understand through these calculations and experiments more of the inner workings of the universe and how it came to be. The scientists’ mastery of physics and mathematics demonstrate that these disciplines have the power to reveal the basic truths that underpin reality. Such insights come from years of study but also from imagination, thinking outside the box, and the ability to see links between unlikely facts which then come together to form an unexpected and beautiful symmetry.

    And thus, the “aha” moment that comes from study. Whilst I am not anticipating quite such ground breaking experiences for the school community over the coming term, I very much hope that the combination of our students’ focus and interest and the enthusiasm and skill of our teachers will lead Roedean girls to appreciate further the delights of scholarship.

    By Frances King, Headmistress at Tuesday, 10 January 2012

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