Rumors are flying almost as fast as particles at the Large Hadron Collider (part of which is in the photo). And internal memos are leaking. The world’s largest scientific instrument may have seen evidence of the Higgs boson. Or maybe not.
Though some media outlets have called the claim a hoax, Jon Butterworth, who leads the British team at the LHC, says it is not and that the findings really do point to the existence of the Higgs. But Butterworth, who blogs on science for The Guardian, emphasizes that the evidence needs to be checked and the experiments repeated.
The Higgs particle, to date a still-theoretical entity, is another one of those counter-intuitive physics things many of us will have to learn to explain to the public, especially of this thing turns out to be real. It’s a particle, but it’s also a field that pervades the universe and gives other particles mass. How are we going to make that stick when most people don’t even know what a light-year is? The irrepressible Leon Lederman gave us some help on the hype when he allowed his publisher to entitle his 1993 book The God Particle. Lederman swears the title wasn’t his idea. The particle in question is the Higgs.
The UK’s Daily Mail headlines its story: “Mass hysteria!” Kinda cute once you realize what kind of mass they’re talking about.
David Shiga at New Scientist explains the origins of the rumors–a draft of an abstract posted anonymously on a physics blog. You can read the abstract on the blog, posted last Thursday.
Mike Wall of Live Science sensibly starts his lede with “A rumor is floating…” Second graf calls it a controversial rumor. Writing last Friday, he notes that it could be a hoax. But that was before Butterworth weighed in.
Perhaps the best all-around account of the state of play as of Monday morning was Ian O’Neill‘s report on Discovery News. He has a nice quote from Butterworth’s interview on the UK’s Channel 4: “If we got this excited about every single thing, no one would get any sleep.” Hm. Couldn’t that be read two ways?
–Boyce Rensberger
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