Physics and culture collide

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 18:32:00 +0000

IN GEVEVA A COUPLE of weeks ago, some profoundly smart people overseeing the Large Hadron Collider seem to have located the Higgs boson—the so-called God Particle. Since then, they have been trying to tell us what it is. It may or may not be the root of all matter in the universe. It may be a particle, and if it is, it is the particle that gives all other particles mass. But it also could be a field or a wave. Also, if you manage to produce a Higgs boson, a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second later, you will no longer have a Higgs boson.

A story in the New York Times suggested that a good way to think about how the Higgs boson’s relationship to matter is: “Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.” That’s not a good way to think about anything. Even National Geographic, which may not have any great purchase of the Standard Model of Physics but is, at least, scientific, could only establish that the scientists are 99% sure there’s only a one-in-a-million chance they’re wrong about finding the Higgs boson or “something of the like.” I talk like that a lot, but I’m full of it. Perhaps not so much, though, as the eminent Nobel Prize-winning physicist who before the boson was actually found called it a “toilet” because according to the New York Times “that’s where all the ugly details that allow the marvelous beauty of the physical world are hidden.”

Salon.com > Dennie Wendt

Physics and culture collide