Giant leaps for mankind

The recent Higgs boson revelation ranks as one of our greatest discoveries. Mark Evans looks at some of the others that can rival it

IT’S been a month since the known universe changed utterly. On July 4, scientists from all over the world waited with bated breath for the news they had all been waiting half a century to hear. Only a select few managed to cram into an auditorium at Cern’s headquarters in Switzerland; the vast majority watched eagerly online.

What they wanted to hear was that the most complex — and most expensive — machine ever built, the Large Hadron Collider, had detected the elusive Higgs boson. The man who predicted its existence, Peter Higgs, was near the front row. Finally, Cern director Rolf Heuer announced: “As a layman I would now say I think we have it.” Cue wild applause across the world.

While the average layman would struggle to explain exactly what Cern had found, there is no doubt everyone understands it was a momentous discovery, one that we can add to those other giant scientific leaps for mankind.

But how does it rank among the best? Would the discovery of the unimaginably tiny Higgs boson outdo the finding that 84% of the universe is made of ‘dark matter’? How does it stand next to the genius inspirations of Newton or Einstein on the workings of the universe? Or against Watson and Crick’s discovery on the workings of our anatomy?

There is no doubt the Higgs discovery is among the top 10 of all time. It is up to you to decide where it ranks...

The Earth Moves — 1543

Before Nicolaus Copernicus published his monumental idea, the greatest scientific minds had for almost two millennia believed the sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around the Earth. Then the Polish astronomer triggered one the biggest paradigm shifts of the Renaissance with his belief, based on observation, that our planet was just another satellite of the sun. Though the thesis was at odds with the religious beliefs at the time, churches did not take a trenchant stance against it until Galileo came along in the next century.

Laws of Motion — 1687

Isaac Newton’s famous discovery about the nature of gravity would be trumped by Einstein so we will praise his other epic truth about nature. Everyone knows ‘for every action there’s an equal but opposite reaction’. Newton’s explanations on how objects interact lie behind everything from riding a bicycle, playing pool or sending a rocket to the moon. The three laws break down when you start talking about colliding subatomic particles, but they are still as true today as they were when Newton figured them out almost 350 years ago.

Electromagnetism — 1821

He didn’t find the link between electricity and magnetism and he wasn’t alone in describing those links, but England’s Michael Faraday was the poster boy for the discovery of one of the four fundamental forces in the universe. His genius was in experimentation. He discovered how to cause an electric current to flow in a coil of wire just by passing a magnet through it, and how to turn a piece of metal into a powerful magnet by passing a current through a coil of wire around it — laying the foundations for the electric motor and the electromagnet.

Natural Selection — 1859

Charles Darwin discovered that every species alive today is related through common ancestors. It is still a difficult idea to comprehend today, so it is easy to understand the reaction it received in the Victorian age. The idea of evolution was known and accepted by the scientific community in Darwin’s time, but it was his brilliant theory of natural selection that upset the status quo. In essence, his idea is that species evolve when they are forced to adapt to their environment. It is not, as is generally believed, survival of the fittest, but survival of those who fit their locality best.

Quantum Mechanics — 1900

No wonder the term ‘quantum mechanics’ has replaced ‘rocket science’ to mean something bewilderingly difficult to comprehend. When it comes to explaining the interactions between subatomic particles, nothing is as it seems. The ‘normal’ laws of physics break down in the nanoverse: light behaves like a particle or a wave depending on who’s watching; every particle in the universe changes when you put the kettle on; and cats are equally alive and dead if you don’t look at them. If we had to pick one representative for QM, it would go to the ‘father of quantum theory’, Germany’s Max Planck.

General Relativity — 1916

Think of the word ‘scientist’ and the image of an old wild-haired man with a German accent springs instantly to mind. And with good reason. Albert Einstein may be the archetypal genius, but that is because his achievements were truly astronomical. He nabbed a Nobel prize for proving that photons were packets of energy; showed nothing could travel at the speed of light; and gave the world the E=mc 2 equation. However, we opt here for his theory which outdid Newton in describing how gravity works — mass warps spacetime, causing hollows in the fabric of the universe down which objects seem to ‘fall’.

Big Bang — 1927

The term ‘Big Bang’ was coined by someone who did not believe that the entire universe was once packed into an infinitely dense but infinitely small area. The prevailing idea was that the universe, though expanding, had no beginning and would have no ending. The Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre proposed that the universe was expanding, thus leading to the idea that at some point in its distant past it had begun its expansion suddenly. Very soon, astronomers backed up this theory with observational facts and soon the anti-Big Bang crowd were silenced.

Structure of DNA — 1953

While most of the truly great discoveries concern the universe at large, this concerns inner space — the very shape of the blueprint of life. Though James Watson and Francis Crick’s giant leap came almost a century after DNA was discovered, their idea gave the arena of molecular biology a turbo boost. This realisation of the fact that deoxyribonucleic acid is structured in a double helix formed the foundations for modern molecular biology, biochemistry, biology, genetics and medicine.

Dark Energy — 1998

It is a truly remarkable idea that almost all of the universe is missing — 96% of it, in fact. Just 4% of the known universe is made of the atoms and particles that we understand so well. 23% is made of dark matter, particles we cannot see or measure. The vast bulk of outer space, 73%, comprises dark energy. It wasn’t until space telescopes were able to measure how fast supernovae were travelling away from us that scientists realised they were accelerating. Something was causing the universe to ignore the effects of gravity and expand at a phenomenal rate. This big idea was cultivated by many scientists over many decades, but its representative must be the man who coined the term ‘dark energy’, US cosmologist Michael Turner.

Higgs Boson — 2012

While out hillwalking in 1964, English physicist Peter Higgs (above) had his eureka moment. His idea concerned the puzzle about how subatomic particles acquired their mass. Higgs’s idea was that when the universe was less than a second old, the particles were all zipping about with no mass. Suddenly, they interacted with a field that gave them mass, which allowed gravity to clump them together so they could form atoms, dust, stars and, eventually, Peter Higgs. It took €7.5bn and almost four years before the Large Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson and one announcement signalled the end of the Standard Model era of physics and the beginning of a new, exciting and strange realm of inquiry.

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