New York Times essay: “How do eminent physicists tackle the Higgs boson? With chocolate”

In 1964, in Physical Review Letters, Peter Higgs published “Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons.” Then four decades passed, during which physicists continued probing and pondering the subatomic microrealm and the standard model that describes it—and during which the Large Hadron Collider, with its prospects for investigating the Higgs boson, moved from concept to early stages of realization.

In 2005, during a dinner conversation at Uppsala Castle in Sweden, Robert Garisto—a Physical Review Letters editor—found himself appointed adjudicator of a bet about the Higgs. The contestants, as Garisto puts it in the New York Times, are “two of the world’s leading experts on particle physics: the theorist Frank Wilczek, the previous year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and Janet Conrad, a leading experimentalist.”

With the wine flowing, Garisto reports, Wilczek predicted that the Higgs will indeed turn up at the Large Hadron Collider in the range where theorists expect it. Conrad bet against him, and them.

The stakes? Future directions for fundamental physics, and some chocolate.

Wilczek had the confidence, thanks to the weight of theorists’ common wisdom, to give Conrad 10-to-1 odds. If the Higgs appears as predicted, he gets 10 Nobel chocolate coins. If it doesn’t, she gets 100.

Garisto’s brief, informal essay “How do eminent physicists tackle the Higgs boson? With chocolate” appears in the Science Times section of the 29 November Times. Members and friends of the physics community have at least two reasons to read the piece. It’s nice press for the intrinsic beauty of curiosity-driven fundamental physics, and it’s fun.

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.