Major East Coast newspapers celebrate the Higgs announcement
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0169
Revised 07/06/2012:
A day later, the Wall Street Journal continued its opinion-page celebration by presenting Michio Kaku’s op-ed “The spark that caused the Big Bang: There’s a reason the newly discovered Higgs boson is called the ‘God particle.’ It started it all.”
Kaku, a theoretical physicist whose commentaries appear regularly in the WSJ, begins by noting physicists’ celebrations: “Champagne bottles were being uncorked at particle accelerators around the world this week as physicists celebrated one of the great moments in scientific history: the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson.” He explains the Large Hadron Collider, describes the experiment process, outlines the standard model and the Higgs’s place in it, addresses the controversy over the phrase God particle, and discusses the question, “Why is the universe so unsymmetrical and broken?” His closing paragraph merits quoting:
With the discovery of the Higgs boson, a whole new chapter in physics opens up. CERN’s collider could lead to the discovery of unseen dimensions, parallel universes, and possibly the “strings” in string theory (in which the Standard Model is just the lowest vibrating octave). In other words, the discovery of the Higgs is but the first step toward a much grander Theory of Everything.
Original post 07/05/2012:
In a 4 July article by Virat Markandeya of the Inside Science News Service at the American Institute of Physics, the opening paragraph summarizes news receiving enthusiastic, high-visibility coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal:
Scientists from two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe confirmed the existence of a new heavy particle, likely to be the long-sought Higgs boson, thanks to troves of particle-collision data that yielded discovery-level certainty upon analysis. The results, announced at a major particle physics conference in Melbourne, Australia, mark the culmination of a search for a heavy particle believed to give mass to elementary particles such as electrons and quarks.
Dennis Overbye’s front-page Times article ‘Physicists say they have found elusive particle, seen as key to universe’ mentions ‘a rock-concert ambience’ for the moment at CERN, and celebrates with an analogy:
Like Omar Sharif materializing out of the shimmering desert as a man on a camel in ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ the elusive boson has been coming slowly into view since last winter, as the first signals of its existence grew until they practically jumped off the chart.
Overbye stipulates, though, that Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN’s director general, ‘said that it was too soon to know for sure ... whether the new particle is the one predicted by the Standard Model.... It may be an impostor as yet unknown to physics, perhaps the first of many particles yet to be discovered.’ Overbye adds, ‘Dr. Heuer said that he had decided only on Tuesday afternoon to call the Higgs result a ‘discovery.’ He said, ‘I know the science, and as director general I can stick out my neck.’ ‘
By the end of the day on 4 July, the Washington Post‘s ‘Scientists’ search for Higgs boson yields new subatomic particle’ had already drawn nearly 2000 online comments. Authors Brian Vastag and Joel Achenbach open in a frankly celebratory way:
It was the biggest of Big Science, a $10 billion effort involving 6,000 researchers, a 17-mile circular tunnel deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland, thousands of torpedo-size magnets capable of bending beams of subatomic matter, and trillions of subatomic collisions—all in the quest for a momentary hint, the slightest residual footprint, of an elusive particle called the Higgs boson.
And it worked. Wednesday’s announcement by scientists in Europe that they’d found the Higgs boson, or something remarkably Higgs-like, was a stunning triumph of both theory and experiment.
Vastag and Achenbach note that the ‘announcement was a global event, observed in every time zone.’
They also quote University of Chicago physicist Michael Turner: ‘It looks like a Higgs; it quacks like a Higgs; but we need DNA tests (more data) to make sure it is the Higgs.’ Turner looks to the future with this quoted statement: ‘Okay, the particle physicists got their Number 1 wish—the Higgs. Now we cosmologists want ours—the dark-matter particle.’
The Wall Street Journal‘s coverage emphasizes historical framing too. The WSJ‘s news article ‘Discovery may help tell universe’s secrets: After half-century search, scientists pin down Higgs-like particle, closing in on explanation for why all objects exist’ includes this:
Going back to Galileo and Kepler, ‘a 400-year-old quest to describe the world that we can see has now been completed,’ said Gordon Kane, professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. ‘It completes the standard model.’
A decade ago, Dr. Kane wagered $100 that the Higgs boson would be found and cosmologist Stephen Hawking bet that it wouldn’t. ‘I assume he’s a gentleman and a scholar and will now pay up,’ said Dr. Kane.
The WSJ also offers an immediate editorial, ‘Smashing success: The Higgs boson breakthrough marks a beginning, not an end,’ also with a focus on historical framing. The editors go all the way back to the early atomic theory proponents Democritus and Lucretius (though they omit Isaac Newton). Their closing merits quoting:
Even Wednesday’s breakthrough leaves further frontiers to be tested. It could be months before CERN’s wizards know whether the new particle they have observed is of the simplest Higgs variety or if it is something more exotic. The Standard Model is already being extended with string theory and—deep breath—the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Producing dark matter, that strange stuff that is posited to account for much of our universe yet is also absent from the Standard Model, could be the next big task for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
The seas of modern science, in other words, are stormy and contain many uncharted waters. For now, though, it is enough to marvel again at how far we have sailed.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.