The Science of Discworld IV

other sixteen particles in the ‘standard model’ of particle physics. What was once wild surmise has now become respectable orthodoxy, and the standard model has now taken a giant leap towards becoming a law of nature. However, it hasn’t yet attained that status, because the current state of knowledge leaves some alternatives open.
    At the end of 2011, if you were an optimist, the Higgs was barely visible, a statistically insignificant bump on a graph at an energy of about 125 GeV (billion electronvolts). By the middle of 2012, the same bump had achieved five-sigma significance, meaning that the chance that it was spurious was less than one in two million. On 4 July 2012 CERN, the European laboratory that administers and runs the LHC, announced the existence of the Higgs.
    Well,
a
Higgs. Higgs-like. Sort of Higgsy. (A theory called super-symmetry, currently popular among mathematical physicists,predicts at least
five
Higgses. Maybe this is just the first.) The observations did fit the predicted behaviour of
the
Higgs, a specific theoretical construct, but some key properties of the real particle have not yet been measured. No one can be certain that those will fit too, until suitable data have been collected. But now the particle physicists know where to look.
    Journalists, true to form, insisted on referring to the Higgs as the God particle, for no very sensible reason except sensational headlines. The name comes from the book
The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
by Nobel prize-winning physicist Leon Ledermann. However, he wanted to call the Higgs the goddamn particle because of all the trouble it was causing. His publisher brought God into it.
    This is always a dangerous tactic. It is presumably why some people with religious objectives imagine there is a link between the Higgs and their concept of God – just as some previously imagined that Stephen Hawking’s use of ‘the mind of God’ in
A Brief History of Time
was a theological statement rather than a metaphor. The ‘God particle’ name must surely be what inspired some hopeful doorstep missionary to claim (as reported in
New Scientist
) that scientists now believe in God. The evangelist’s reason – ‘They’ve found Him in the Large Hadron Kaleidoscope’ – is a dead giveaway.
    Pity about ‘kaleidoscope’, of course, but that slip pales into insignificance compared to the claim that scientists now believe in God because they’ve observed the Higgs. It’s like citing the photon to prove they’ve seen the light.
    Ian, being a mathematician, rather likes the standard model cake with Higgs icing, although he’d have been even happier if the Higgs had turned out not to exist, as Hawking once predicted. That would have been much more exciting. Jack, a biologist, has more misgivings. He is worried that the evidence for all fundamental particles depends on specific
interpretations
of the data, and the manner by which they are obtained. It’s not easy to observe a new particle: you don’t justlook for it and see it, like in the old days. In particular, you spot a Higgs by the company it keeps. It doesn’t hang around long enough to be observed in its own right; instead, it decays into a complicated shower of other particles. So you have to look for the kind of shower that a Higgs would produce, and infer the presence of a Higgs.
    By analogy, consider a piano, as observed by pianologists: creatures that have great facility with sound, but can’t see a piano or feel what shape it is. How would they find out what this musical instrument is made of?
    Let’s allow them the ability to throw things at it. Hurling small stones would be rewarded, from time to time, by a musical note.
We
know this occurs when a stone hits a key, but pianologists would detect only the music. By collecting data, they would find a range of notes, with a nice mathematical structure. Clearly a piano is made from twangons of various frequencies. Experiments at higher energy would reveal a new and rather different ‘pianicle’: the slamon. (
We
understand that you get this by slamming the lid shut.) Now it’s got more complicated. Soon the pianino has joined the list, along with the muano, the tauano and much else.
    Instead of making everything simpler, new data at higher energies has just muddied the waters. So how do pianologists propose to resolve the many theoretical issues involved? They obtain large government grants to create