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Shrewsbury – On Sept. 10, University of Notre Dame physics professor Michael Hildreth addressed an audience of 100 St. John’s High School students, teachers and guests on the topic of “Chasing the ‘God Particle’: a Journey from Central Mass to the Higgs Boson.” Hildreth, a Hudson native and 1984 graduate of St. John’s in Shrewsbury, is now a physicist specializing in the study of elementary particles.
This event was one in a series of Hesburgh Lectures, at which distinguished Notre Dame professors speak about their areas of expertise at locations around the United States. This presentation traced one scientist’s trajectory through the international community of particle physics and offered a basic guided tour of the subatomic world, as explored by the largest scientific instrument ever engineered.
Attendees had the opportunity to engage with Hildreth during his presentation, and asked him questions about his research on the Higgs boson particle and how the world of particle physics affects our society in general. The Higgs boson (occasionally referred to as the “God particle”) is an elementary particle that is the smallest possible indicator of the Higgs field – a field that explains why and how particles have mass, and exists everywhere, always “turned on.” The Higgs field, as Professor Hildreth described, fundamentally affects the properties of everything in the universe.
With degrees from Princeton and Stanford, Professor Hildreth has conducted research at all of the world’s particle physics laboratories, including CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, where he works on the Large Hadron Collider. Co-author of more than 700 publications, he has been recognized by the Department of Energy as an Outstanding Junior Investigator and by the Research Corporation as a Cottrell Scholar.
The lecture was held at Saint John’s in conjunction with the Notre Dame Club of Worcester County. Hildreth spent the day visiting his former teachers, meeting with students, and sitting in on science and math classes.
