By now I guess we’ve all heard the news. The so-called “god particle,” aka Higgs boson, has been located. “Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe,” headlined the New York Times story depicting scientists toasting with champagne and breathing sighs of relief. They’ve been looking for this bad boy for decades.
For those of you who don’t know what a boson is, it has nothing to do with either “bosun” ( a functionary on a boat) or a bison (a shaggy, supersized 19th century cow). This is something else entirely. Even if it’s not clear exactly what.
Scientists have high hopes for this particular boson. According to that New York Times story it “…could point the way to new deeper ideas …about the nature of reality.”
Such high expectations of clarity and understanding. And yet so much confusion about the little fellow himself. First, it’s not a particle in the usual sense of a small piece of something. With a normal sort of particle you know something about it, but as one of the scientists pointed out, “It’s great to discover a new particle, but you have find out what its properties are.” Really.
It may hold the key to the universe but although the story is that they’ve discovered it, as best as the science writers or the scientists themselves can explain it, they don’t know exactly what “it” is. “Elusive” is hardly the word. Apparently it might not even be just one but several whatevers. It could even be “imposter.” Some scientists are hedging by calling it only “Higgslike”. (Although what does it mean to say something is like a thing whose properties you don’t really know anything about?)
Nevermind, it’s “very, very significant” according to a scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, “… one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks,” which I think is a physicist’s way of saying sliced bread.
The question, as with all such scientific announcements: what are we to make of this? What’s the relation of Cape Cod to Higgs Boson?
The finer points of climate change science may elude some of us, even if it’s already apparently causing unprecedented heat waves, rising seas, and bizarrely violent storms.
But this Higgs boson, key to the nature of reality and the meaning of life: what are our chances of making any sense whatsoever of it?
Most of us have taken the last 100 years or more of cutting edge physics in stride. Ahem, of course, E = mc2; who doesn’t know that? Anti-matter? Opposite of matter, right? (So in some dim sense the opposite of us? Hmmm.) Big Bang: the universe is still expanding from a compact version of itself the size of a golf ball or so; right you are. Quarks. Black holes. String theory: sure, the world, that is to say you and I among other features, is, like, made up of little bits of string. What could be clearer? Elegant, even, as the scientists like to say.
We learn the strange words and a little about these discoveries of underlying reality, and go on about our business.
Will this new particle being celebrated as a key to understanding of the universe make it any clearer to those of us living in it? Do the tiny strings and anti-matter help? (They are all around us but where are they?)
So, what is the relationship of Cape Cod to Higgs boson? As with most cutting edge science, there isn’t one. It may be the key to our own reality, it may in fact in some sense be more real than we are, but you can’t get there from here.
I think that last sentence is about as close as we’re going to get to it.
As to why there is no apostrophe in Higgs, just another part of the mystery.
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