New York Times celebrates the Higgs boson story
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2395
On 5 March, the New York Times devoted its entire weekly Science Times section to a rousing, almost impassioned, review of the story of the Higgs boson, with additional offerings online.
The celebration’s backbone comes from Times science writer Dennis Overbye in the form of an introduction followed by excerpts from his past major reports on the Higgs search. The excerpts’ headlines suggest how they trace the story: ‘Promised fireballs ,’ from August 2010; ‘Game of bumps ,’ a December 2010 explanation of the statistical nature of the search; ‘Still missing ,’ from July 2011; ‘Oozing into view ,’ from November 2011; and ‘Opening the box ,’ from June 2012. Online, the Times presents some of the illustrations as animations.
An excerpt from the introduction conveys Overbye’s spirit and tone:
On the way to fulfill what they thought was their generation’s rendezvous with scientific destiny, the physicists dangled from harnesses in hard hats to construct detectors bigger than apartment buildings in underground caverns. They strung wires and cranked bolts to coax thousand-ton magnets to less than a thousandth of an inch of where they needed to be. They wrote millions of lines of code to calibrate and run devices that would make NASA engineers stand by the track with their hats in their hands in admiration.
In their down time, they proposed marriage and made rap videos in the tunnels where subatomic particles collided. They ate, slept and partied, threw snowballs and worried that an unguarded smile in the cafeteria or a glance at a friend’s laptop could bias a half-billion-dollar experiment or give away cosmic secrets.
There are also a glossary with 20 entries from ‘atoms’ to ‘W and Z bosons,’ the sidebar ‘All signs point to Higgs, but scientific certainty is a waiting game ,’ a short reading list , and online only, the annotated historical timeline ‘The Higgs, from theory to reality.’
Also online, the Times blurbs its five-minute video ‘Collision course ’ this way: ‘It was the longest, most costly manhunt in science for an elusive particle that was said to be key to the workings of the universe.’ The clip begins with physicist Lyn Evans ruminating in amazement at what has been discovered. Then a narrator says, ‘The year 2012 brought the science discovery of the century, at least so far.’ The clip shows the dramatic presentations of 4 July 2012, with Peter Higgs himself in the audience to hear the discovery presented formally.
On an entirely noncelebratory note, however, the Times also presents, online only, Overbye’s essay ‘Particle physicists in US worry about being left behind .’ The teaser blurb says, ‘American scientists are wondering what role, if any, they will play in the future in high-energy physics—the search for the fundamental particles and forces of nature—a field they once dominated.’
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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.