National newspapers join physicists in tentative Higgs excitement
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0220
The Wall Street Journal put the news from Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider on page A6. The New York Times put it on page A12. But the Washington Post front-paged it: “Scientists say ‘God particle’ discovery is nearly at hand.”
Brian Vastag and Joel Achenbach’s opening lines in the Post piece probably summarize about as well as the WSJ‘s Gautam Naik and the NYT‘s Dennis Overbye have done:
It was a big day for a very small particle that, when all was said and done, remained invisible, indeed still theoretical. But even if scientists couldn’t claim Tuesday that they had “discovered” the fabled Higgs boson, they were exultant, convinced that their experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva are zeroing in on a particle believed to be essential to the fabric of the universe.
“We know the goal is close,” said Fabiola Gianotti, a physicist representing one of two competing CERN teams searching for the elusive particle. “This is the nicest feeling.”
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), said another year’s worth of data needs to be compiled before anyone can reach “a definitive answer on the Shakespearean question on the Higgs: To be or not to be?”
But the scientists in Geneva were leaning in one direction Tuesday: It will eventually be.
A Post editor may have overstated with the headline “Scientists say ‘God particle’ discovery is nearly at hand.” The other papers’ headlines show more restraint. The authors of all three articles, however, appear to have tried hard to convey the message that although nothing is settled, lots of experts see a strong possibility of proof soon. Here’s how the NYT‘s Overbye, speaking in terms of the statistics, reported that:
Over the last 20 years suspicious bumps that might have been the Higgs have come and gone—most recently last summer—and the same thing could happen again. Physicists said the chance that these results were a fluke because of random fluctuations in the background of normal physics was about 1 percent, which is too high to claim a discovery, but is enough to inspire excitement.
All three newspapers allotted the space for thorough explanations of the news and its physics context. All three articles explain the standard model, the history going back to Peter Higgs and his colleagues in the 1960s, the Large Hadron Collider, and the investigation’s fundamentally statistical nature. All three use a tone that conveys earnest respect for—maybe even adoption of—physicists’ excitement.
All three articles display the same particle-collision image from a CERN public-relations exhibit. The NYT adds a second illustration, showing CERN’s director general Rolf Heuer and Guido Tonelli, the spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid collaboration.
And all three articles quote prominent physicists. The WSJ piece ends by noting that “like many physicists, Dr. [Stefan] Soldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester isn’t necessarily eager for the Higgs to be found. ‘It would perhaps be even more exciting if it isn’t where it’s supposed to be,’ he said. ‘Then we’d have to come up with something else.’ ”
On 15 December, the day after the articles appeared, Columbia University physics professor and science popularizer Brian Greene joined the Higgs pre-celebration by publishing a New York Times op-ed. For an audience that might not have seen the previous day’s science-news coverage, Greene offers his own, personalized version of the many-decades-long Higgs story. Most of what he says corresponds with what the NYT‘s Overbye had reported, but Greene’s ending paragraph might merit quoting:
For me, as a theorist standing outside the experimental effort, the result is no less exciting. Years ago, when I was in high school, my physics teacher gave the class a homework problem: calculating the trajectory of a ball swinging from the ceiling by a piece of chewing gum. That night, when I finished the calculation, I ran down the hallway to show my father—I was utterly and profoundly amazed that mathematical symbols scratched in pencil on a piece of paper could describe things that actually happened in the real world. That’s when I became hooked on physics. With Tuesday’s announcement, tentative though it may be, I’m awed yet again.
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. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for Science and the Media . 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.