07.04.12
Pomposity Boogie
You’ve now found it impossible to miss the spectacle of some of the country’s biggest phonies, journalists who assiduously avoided anything science in college, writing about the “God particle.”
Rebecca J. Rosen is an associate editor at The Atlantic. She was previously an associate editor at The Wilson Quarterly, where she spearheaded the magazine’s In Essence section (a place where no science is seen, ever).
We stand today on the eve of one of the most highly anticipated scientific announcements of all time: an “update in the search for the Higgs boson” (a delightfully understated description if there ever were one). Has the world ever been so excited about a particle before? No. But why? What is this Higgs boson, and is there more to it than just its catchy moniker, the “God particle”?
Cut to an animation from “PHD Comics.” The Atlantic is a Google Editor’s Choice, mostly because The Atlantic bribes them.
So, you might be asking what’s so important about finding the Higgs boson?
The short answer is that the Higgs boson can account for all of the unexplained mass in the universe …
Particle physics is the study of the individual elements that comprise our universe. As most know, atoms are composed of smaller components; neutrons, electrons and protons. When electrons jump between atoms, new substances are formed, but the nucleus of an atom generally remains unchanged unless it undergoes a nuclear reaction …
I’m eagerly awaiting the announcement tomorrow. If the scientists at the LHC found proof of the Higgs boson, it would be huge for the scientific community and the future of science as we know it.
From TIME:
Sometime Wednesday, depending on word that comes out of a press conference in Geneva, the universe will cease to exist. All forms of matter — planets, stars, dogs, cars, you — will effectively dissolve. Mass will be no more; only energy will remain.
That’s the bad possibility. The good possibility is that researchers working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the mammoth, $10 billion particle accelerator located 380 ft. (116 m) underground at the French-Swiss border — will announce that they’ve at last confirmed the existence of the long-sought Higgs boson …
From the New York Times, by Dennis Overbye:
ASPEN, Colo. — Physicists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a potential key to an understanding of why elementary particles have mass and indeed to the existence of diversity and life in the universe …
I mention Overbye only because I once tried to read his Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos.
At any time, from a guaranteed sleeping pill. If you ever wanted to discourage anyone from becoming a little too fascinated with science and discovery, Overbye’s was the book to give them. Gift-wrapped.
Journalists do take science courses. If compelled. Decades ago I taught biochemistry lab at Lehigh. It was a senior/grad level course and it occasionally attracted journalists who were trying to attain a credential to burnish their careers as “science writers” for newspapers.
They were always sorry lot.
Today, it’s easier for them. Now there are college tracks for Science Journalism, degree programs which allow you to skip all the hard stuff for nifty courses about the history of science, current news topics in science, and “investigative science journalism.”
Years ago I attended a journalist’s seminar at the University of Maryland on a Knight Fellowship to learn about nuclear proliferation.
I was the only trained scientist in the bunch and one of the faculty organizers remarked “There aren’t many like you doing this.”
One of the Manhattan Project’s old scientists, Carson Mark, was a lecturer.
Mark gave a long seminar on the basics of fission, one in which he spent time speaking about the geometry of a bare critical assembly. It was a good lecture. The journalists virtually rioted, complaining bitterly afterward that they had their time wasted getting bogged down in the arcana of mathematics and high energy physics.
