Higgs

“ But Higgs refused to come, and Orme, in whom his foolish taunt seemed still to rankle, only shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.
“Let the black curs go,” exclaimed the Professor as he polished his blue spectacles and mopped his face. “They are a white-livered lot of sneaks. Look! There she is, creeping off to the left. If we run round that sand-hill we shall meet her.” ”

“ Higgs, not knowing, said nothing, moving about now, puttings things in order and getting his master's bath ready.
“I've lost an old gentleman, Higgs,” said Pugeot, for Higgs was a confidential servant as well as a valet.
“Indeed, sir,” said Higgs, as if losing old gentlemen were as common as losing umbrellas.
“And the whole business is so funny I can scarcely believe it's true. I haven't a touch of the jimjams, have I, Higgs?”
“Lord, sir, no! You're all right.”
“Am I? See here, Higgs: yesterday morning I met old Mr. Simon Pettigrew, the lawyer. ”

“ MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF THOMAS HIGGS.
Higgs' factory was a mine of delight for the gossips of Birmingham. It was a small building, but quite large enough to hold a mystery. Who the proprietor was, or where he came from, none could tell. He looked like a gentleman—that was certain—though everybody knew he had risen from an apprenticeship; and he could handle his pen like a writing-master. ”

“ Higgs, do you propose to live, to manage the farm?" I asked.
"I did live and find bread for the boy before, and I'll do it again, sir," she answered.
"But for one to defy many is up-hill work, and you without a protector now," I said..."Tell me the truth, Margaret," I added, "is Higgs dead?" ”

“ Instantly he knew that Higgs was afraid of that red-haired man with the shining pink skin and would never [233] dare to have the ward in darkness, never dare to have even shade in it, whatever the custom or the regulations might be. And also he understood why ever and again Higgs went out of the room at the upper end; he went out to assure himself of the presence of Jordan or some such other helper, within call. ”

“ Professor Higgs’s rivals and enemies, of whom either the brilliancy of his achievements or his somewhat abrupt and pointed methods of controversy seem to have made him a great many, have risen up, or rather seated themselves, and written him down—well, an individual who strains the truth. ”

“ Higgs, in the crowd of his terrors, knowing that his row with the sailor was known, could foresee nothing but the gallows; but Margaret, after sitting like a stone a long time, proposed flight, she to bury the body down by Severn, and in three nights' time to meet Higgs secretly on the Chase, to let him know whether he might safely return home. ”

“ I intend to live to write a book on Mur,” and Higgs shook his fist at the advancing clouds with an air that was really noble. It reminded me of Ajax defying the lightning.
Meanwhile I had been reflecting.
“Listen,” I said. “Our only chance is to stop where we are, for if we move we shall certainly be buried alive. Look; there is something solid to lie on,” and I pointed to a ridge of rock, a kind of core of congealed sand, from which the surface had been swept by gales. ”

“ Gimblet gazed at it with all the emotions of the [238] scientist whose theory has stood the decisive test. His hands fumbled in his excitement, as he hastily snatched out his notebook, and sought in it for the telegraph form Higgs had obtained from the Piccadilly office. ”

“ Anyhow, as no letters ever came to him from his mother's family in Holland, and as nobody living had ever seen old Higgs, the family couldn't be anything much. Probably Thomas Higgs himself was no better than he should be, for all he pretended to carry himself so strait ”

“ The ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN—that 27-kilometer underground circular tunnel used to search for the Higgs boson—takes 90 million measurements 600 million times a second, and these are analyzed by some 6,000 high energy physicists. Worldwide, stored scientific data is approaching a petabyte and doubles every year. ”

“ I decided that I'd found Higgs out, but that I mustn't let him know that I'd found him. You see, the old man is at present my employer, and will probably be my partner. His trick amounted only to obtaining a little guarantee under false pretences, and in business he's as straight as possible. So I wrote just the letter that I should have written if I had really believed that the necklace had been stolen in transit. I thanked him for the charming necklace, and said how much Viola liked it. ”

“ The innovation of attributing fixed weights to the ultimate particles of matter, by which their combining proportions were strictly determined, gave a hitherto unknown definiteness to chemical analysis, and brought it within the scope of numerical calculation. There had, as usual, been partial anticipations. The claims of Dr. Bryan Higgins, professor of chemistry in Dublin, were brought forward by Davy in the Bakerian lecture of 15 Nov. 1810 (Phil. Trans. ci. 15) , and still more emphatically by himself in 1814 (Experiments and Observations on the Atomic Theory) . ”

“ Reduced an atom to radiation and then caused the radiation to reduce back into the original atom. Mansfield just did it with a pound of matter instead of a millimicrogram in a cloud chamber."
"But Mr. Higgins," said Peter hopefully, "doesn't the fact that I did transmit matter prove that the project is feasible? All I have to do now is to discover the way of transmitting whatever field of force or basic energy is required to maintain the original form of the object. Whatever binding energy holds the atoms together, one to the next, to create the whole object." ”

“ In lecturing to students upon mathematical physics, especially in the theory of electricity and magnetism, Professor Gibbs felt, as so many other physicists in recent years have done, the desirability of a vector algebra by which the more or less complicated space relations, dealt with in many departments of physics, could be conveninently and perspicuously expressed ”

“ I embraced the suggestion and started an experimental research, at the same time studying the theories of Gibbs, Helmholtz, and other authorities, mostly German, on physical chemistry. The more one penetrates the depths of any problem the more he yields to the belief that this problem is the most important problem in the world. This happened to me; and the Faraday-Maxwell electromagnetic theory was shelved, temporarily, on account of my interest in physical chemistry, and particularly on account of the prospect of finding there a doctor dissertation, which I finally did. ”

“ Huggins has shown that many of the substances most abundant on the earth are widely spread through the universe. Take, for instance, the metal iron and the gas hydrogen. We can detect the existence of these elements in objects enormously distant. Both iron and hydrogen exist in many stars, and hydrogen has been shown, in all probability, to be an important constituent of the nebulæ. That the rest of the sidereal system should thus be composed of materials known to be to a large extent identical with the materials in the solar system is a presumption in favor of the universality of gravitation. ”

“ Whatever may be the ultimate fate of such speculations in revealing to us the mystery of matter, it cannot be denied that they possess a grandeur which is compelling. At all events, in more restricted domains, the principle of action has led to important discoveries.
Hilbert, Klein, Weyl and later Einstein himself, by applying the principle of action to the space-time metrical field, were led to the law of space-time curvature in the interior of matter and outside [Pg 353] matter; that is to say, to Einstein’s law of gravitation. ”

“ The other paths which the quantum-theory permits are occupied, until we get to a considerable distance from the nucleus, whereas in hydrogen they are vacant. Paths that have large [Pg 107] quantum numbers, though possible in theory, cannot occur in practice, at any rate in the laboratory, because they are so large that they would cause the electron to get into the region of other atoms. In certain nebulæ, where matter is almost inconceivably tenuous, the spectrum shows that electrons can travel round hydrogen nuclei in orbits whose total quantum number is as large as 30. ”

“ The potential for any substance in any homogeneous mass is equal to the amount of mechanical work required to bring a unit of the substance by a reversible process from the state in which its energy and entropy are both zero into combination with the homogeneous mass, which at the close of the process must have its original volume, and which is supposed so large as not to be sensibly altered in any part. ”

“ As we may make and for any state of the body which we may choose, we may place the origin of co-ordinates at any point in the plane . Again, it is evident from the form of equation (1) that whatever changes we may make in the units in which volume, entropy, and energy are measured, it will always be possible to make such changes in the units of temperature and pressure, that the equation will hold true in its present form, without the introduction of constants. It is easy to see how a change of the units of volume, entropy, and energy would affect the surface. ”

“ If these escaped electrons are allowed to settle on any object, they will necessarily cause an overcrowding, or, in other words, the object will become negatively electrified.
The one thing that puzzled man most was to find out what the helium atoms were. He had named them alpha rays, but as he found he could not get them to penetrate even a thin sheet of paper, he was confident that they must be atoms of matter. It was only when he had gathered sufficient to examine the spectrum that he found these to be helium atoms. ”

“ With respect to the kinetic energy of the irregular part of the flux, it is to be observed that, since have their average values zero in spaces which are very small in comparison with a wave-length, the integrations implied in the notations may be confined to a sphere of a radius which is small in comparison with a wave-length. Since within such a sphere are sensibly determined by the values of at the center of the sphere, which is the point for which the value of the potentials are sought, must be functions—evidently linear functions—of and must be quadratic functions of the same quantities. ”

“ Some of the invisible rays fell upon a collection of small chemical crystals which were fixed on the surface of a screen. Our fellow-electrons, who were attached to the atoms of the crystals, were bestirred into action. They could not reflect the X-rays, but they set up regular trains of waves in the æther, some of which came within the range that affects man's vision. Man knew that this chemical screen could not produce light on its own account, and it became apparent that the vacuum tube must be sending some æther waves towards the chemical screen. ”

“ For instance, a special vehicle of magnetic force, as is well known, is iron, the other properties of which, such as its colour, specific weight, or relation to acids, are independent of this connexion with magnetism. The same thing is seen in all other forces, which from one end to the other are found to be conditioned and mediated by something else than themselves. Another proof of the finite nature of force is that it requires solicitation before it can put itself forth. ”

“ It must be admitted that this is a possible hypothesis; there are no known facts that prove it to be false. But until we are forced to adopt it, we shall prefer the simpler view that the helium nucleus is complex, like every other except hydrogen, and that its relations of mass and charge to the hydrogen atom are not a lucky fluke. Everything known about nuclei is consistent with the hypothesis that they are composed of hydrogen nuclei and electrons. The evidence that they consist of hydrogen nuclei, electrons, and helium nuclei is overwhelming ”

“ The condition which must be satisfied with reference to in order that neither the change indicated, nor the reverse, shall destroy the homogeneity of the mass, is expressed by equating the above expression to zero. But if we consider the change in the state of the mass (supposed to remain in a state of dissipated energy) to be determined by arbitrary values of of the differentials the case will be entirely different. For, if the mass ceases to be homogeneous, it will consist of two coexistent phases, and as applied to these, only of the quantities will be independent. ”

“ Sometimes Thomson would read the remarkable passage in Hegel's Logik, in which he refers to the Newtonian theory of gravitation and says, "The planets are not pulled this way and that, they move along in their orbits like the blessed gods," and remark upon it. On one occasion his remark was, "Well, gentlemen, if these be his physics, what must his metaphysics be?" And certainly that a philosopher should deny, as Hegel seemed to do, all merit to the philosophical setting in which Newton placed the empirical results of Kepler, is a very remarkable phenomenon. ”

“ But in spite of this, the majority of these physicists i n modern times have found it more convenient to return to the Atomic point of view, and in spite of the warnings of Kästner, one of their number, have begun to regard Matter as consisting of infinitesimally small particles, termed 'atoms'—which atoms have then to be brought into relation with one another by the play of forces attaching to them,—attractive, repulsive, or whatever they may be. This too is metaphysics; and metaphysics which, for its utter unintelligence, there would be sufficient reason to guard against. ”