In retrospect, Peter Higgs revealed his emotional response to an editor’s rejection of his paper on the particle that makes climbing stairs and stopping a runaway truck difficult, the particle that gives mass to matter. He said he felt “indignant” at the rejection. The reason for the rejection: In 1964 “quantum field theory was out of fashion.”*
Not too long after Higgs suffered the indignity of rejection, he found an audience of physicists. After years of experimentation they found the proof needed to liberate Higgs from his indignity with the discovery at CERN of the Higgs boson on July 4, 2012. Suddenly, it became very fashionable to talk about Higgs and his seminal work. Fortunately for Peter, he lived to see his work not only justified, but also honored before a worldwide audience. It is certainly intellectually fashionable now to do research on the tiny but important Higgs field and boson.
Fashions are patterns that capture the unsteady interests of fickle minds. In the case of Higgs, physicists had been researching and theorizing about quantum fields for more than a half century. To many mid-twentieth century young scientists, it was a time to move on, to abandon “quantum fields” for new “fields” of study. Luckily, Higgs wasn’t quite alone in his pursuits—he shared the 2013 Nobel with François Englert “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributres to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles”—but he didn’t have the full community in support in 1964. Within six years, a movement toward hypothesized “strings” was about to become highly fashionable among physicists dressed in bellbottoms and leisure suits. As for the new fashionable hypotheses about strings, well, they were and have been as mesmerizing as disco’s flashing lasers streaking across the dance floors of science, but like the reflections off a rotating mirrored sphere, they have been as yet nothing more than insubstantial flashes, maybe, in fact, even less substantial than massless photons. The Higgs boson, in contrast, has become a standard fashion, something people recognize and continue to wear, like “resort casual” or “formal.”
It’s probably worth anyone’s time to question both clothing fashions and intellectual fashions. The normal of today won’t be the normal of tomorrow, and just as we can look back on the fashions we wore with disbelief, so we can look on those ways of thinking and matters of importance we held so dear years ago. Fashions of thinking seem to change as rapidly as those of clothing.
The search for The Enduring, namely, for the stuff that is fundamental in both the physical and intellectual worlds, has been a pursuit of philosophers and scientists through history. It’s possible that even before the written word, humans dealt with the fashion beyond all fashion, the pattern that gives meaning to a world of seeming chaos. As civilization arose, it first tamed chaos by imposing order through agriculture, releasing whole populations from the randomness of hunting and gathering. Order meant stability, and stability meant time to think about the nature of Nature. As increasingly more urbanized people replaced fields of fields with fields of study, some began to chase after a myriad of fashions in lifestyle and thinking.
Released from the toils of farming and immersed in the affluence civilization brings, have we had too much time on our hands and food in our stomachs? Satiated easily, do we now pursue not just a change in fashionable thinking and fashionable clothing but rather a discovery of the fashion of fashions as the most fundamental characteristic of our existence? In looking for new fashions of thinking we subdivide, then expand, and finally overturn the way we once looked at the world and ourselves. It was the ease of civilization that gave rise to a Peter Higgs, and it was the same ease that led to the initial rejection of his seminal paper by an elitist editor who didn’t find his work “fashionable.” Fortunately, his thinking was just fashionable enough for some physicists to use his work to find the seed of seeds 100 meters beneath the agricultural fields of Meyrin, Switzerland.
The ease of civilization has given us a crop of specializations in universities and in professional journals and has set many new intellectual farmers off in search of new hybrids. Choose almost any “field” to see offshoots from the original questions asked by the ancient and medieval thinkers. It might have been fashionable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be a “naturalist,” but such a designation gave way ever more narrow fields of study, such as geology and biology that in turn have engendered their own subdisciplines like geomorphology, coastal geomorphology, microbiology, and parasitology.
The field of psychology provides us with numerous examples of fields producing fields. Here are some of the journals associated with the “field”: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Clinical Psychology, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Journal of Health Psychology, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Journal of Mind and Behavior, Journal of Research in Personality, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and the list goes on to include psychotherapy, educational psychology, peace psychology, psychological medicine, community, plus others seemingly too numerous to mention. Any of us can imagine an elitist editor rejecting a seminal paper because it might not conform to the fashionable thinking of the time.
We live in an intellectual field of fields. Our crops are fields of study. It’s an agrarianism some 10,000 years in the making, a change that began with the first stirrings of agricultural lifestyles and community gatherings. And today’s “intellectual farmers” are so involved in growing hybrids, that few, like Peter Higgs, are able to get a word in about the soils that those many mental agrarians use to grow the “grains” and “vegetables” du jour.
Of course, those who farm for the tastes of today will argue the necessity of their kinds of agriculture. And just as all pepper farmers appreciate the economic circumstances and physical requirements of their crop, so all those associated with any specific intellectual field also appreciate the circumstances and requirements of their “crop”—to the exclusion of unfashionable ideas.
We have profited from work in subdisciplines like oncology and epidemiology, but are we any closer to a fundamental particle of understanding that, like the Higgs boson, gives substance to substances? We keep dividing and dividing fields, and with every new division comes a need for a further division as if some bureaucracy of intellectual farmers plants new administrators who need assistant managers who need secretaries. Maybe we will go on further dividing our knowledge of the universe and ourselves for as many generations going forward as there were generations of intellectuals going backward, and possibly some subdivision of information will make us see where it all began—or where it all will stop. But for now, we seem to be wending our way through and planting many fields of fields with no particular end in sight. And the occasional farmer who arrives at an insight about the nature of all farms will probably, like Peter Higgs, become indignant when all those “agrarian” specialists reject his insightful work.
* Baggott, Jim, Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle.’ Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 89, 90.
Not too long after Higgs suffered the indignity of rejection, he found an audience of physicists. After years of experimentation they found the proof needed to liberate Higgs from his indignity with the discovery at CERN of the Higgs boson on July 4, 2012. Suddenly, it became very fashionable to talk about Higgs and his seminal work. Fortunately for Peter, he lived to see his work not only justified, but also honored before a worldwide audience. It is certainly intellectually fashionable now to do research on the tiny but important Higgs field and boson.
Fashions are patterns that capture the unsteady interests of fickle minds. In the case of Higgs, physicists had been researching and theorizing about quantum fields for more than a half century. To many mid-twentieth century young scientists, it was a time to move on, to abandon “quantum fields” for new “fields” of study. Luckily, Higgs wasn’t quite alone in his pursuits—he shared the 2013 Nobel with François Englert “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributres to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles”—but he didn’t have the full community in support in 1964. Within six years, a movement toward hypothesized “strings” was about to become highly fashionable among physicists dressed in bellbottoms and leisure suits. As for the new fashionable hypotheses about strings, well, they were and have been as mesmerizing as disco’s flashing lasers streaking across the dance floors of science, but like the reflections off a rotating mirrored sphere, they have been as yet nothing more than insubstantial flashes, maybe, in fact, even less substantial than massless photons. The Higgs boson, in contrast, has become a standard fashion, something people recognize and continue to wear, like “resort casual” or “formal.”
It’s probably worth anyone’s time to question both clothing fashions and intellectual fashions. The normal of today won’t be the normal of tomorrow, and just as we can look back on the fashions we wore with disbelief, so we can look on those ways of thinking and matters of importance we held so dear years ago. Fashions of thinking seem to change as rapidly as those of clothing.
The search for The Enduring, namely, for the stuff that is fundamental in both the physical and intellectual worlds, has been a pursuit of philosophers and scientists through history. It’s possible that even before the written word, humans dealt with the fashion beyond all fashion, the pattern that gives meaning to a world of seeming chaos. As civilization arose, it first tamed chaos by imposing order through agriculture, releasing whole populations from the randomness of hunting and gathering. Order meant stability, and stability meant time to think about the nature of Nature. As increasingly more urbanized people replaced fields of fields with fields of study, some began to chase after a myriad of fashions in lifestyle and thinking.
Released from the toils of farming and immersed in the affluence civilization brings, have we had too much time on our hands and food in our stomachs? Satiated easily, do we now pursue not just a change in fashionable thinking and fashionable clothing but rather a discovery of the fashion of fashions as the most fundamental characteristic of our existence? In looking for new fashions of thinking we subdivide, then expand, and finally overturn the way we once looked at the world and ourselves. It was the ease of civilization that gave rise to a Peter Higgs, and it was the same ease that led to the initial rejection of his seminal paper by an elitist editor who didn’t find his work “fashionable.” Fortunately, his thinking was just fashionable enough for some physicists to use his work to find the seed of seeds 100 meters beneath the agricultural fields of Meyrin, Switzerland.
The ease of civilization has given us a crop of specializations in universities and in professional journals and has set many new intellectual farmers off in search of new hybrids. Choose almost any “field” to see offshoots from the original questions asked by the ancient and medieval thinkers. It might have been fashionable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be a “naturalist,” but such a designation gave way ever more narrow fields of study, such as geology and biology that in turn have engendered their own subdisciplines like geomorphology, coastal geomorphology, microbiology, and parasitology.
The field of psychology provides us with numerous examples of fields producing fields. Here are some of the journals associated with the “field”: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Clinical Psychology, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Journal of Health Psychology, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Journal of Mind and Behavior, Journal of Research in Personality, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and the list goes on to include psychotherapy, educational psychology, peace psychology, psychological medicine, community, plus others seemingly too numerous to mention. Any of us can imagine an elitist editor rejecting a seminal paper because it might not conform to the fashionable thinking of the time.
We live in an intellectual field of fields. Our crops are fields of study. It’s an agrarianism some 10,000 years in the making, a change that began with the first stirrings of agricultural lifestyles and community gatherings. And today’s “intellectual farmers” are so involved in growing hybrids, that few, like Peter Higgs, are able to get a word in about the soils that those many mental agrarians use to grow the “grains” and “vegetables” du jour.
Of course, those who farm for the tastes of today will argue the necessity of their kinds of agriculture. And just as all pepper farmers appreciate the economic circumstances and physical requirements of their crop, so all those associated with any specific intellectual field also appreciate the circumstances and requirements of their “crop”—to the exclusion of unfashionable ideas.
We have profited from work in subdisciplines like oncology and epidemiology, but are we any closer to a fundamental particle of understanding that, like the Higgs boson, gives substance to substances? We keep dividing and dividing fields, and with every new division comes a need for a further division as if some bureaucracy of intellectual farmers plants new administrators who need assistant managers who need secretaries. Maybe we will go on further dividing our knowledge of the universe and ourselves for as many generations going forward as there were generations of intellectuals going backward, and possibly some subdivision of information will make us see where it all began—or where it all will stop. But for now, we seem to be wending our way through and planting many fields of fields with no particular end in sight. And the occasional farmer who arrives at an insight about the nature of all farms will probably, like Peter Higgs, become indignant when all those “agrarian” specialists reject his insightful work.
* Baggott, Jim, Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle.’ Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 89, 90.
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