New York Times reporter stretches to update public on high-energy physics
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0280
This week Dennis Overbye has joined the speculation about high-energy physics prospects for delivering intriguing or even revolutionary research results. For his audience of educated nonscientist readers of the New York Times‘s Science Times section, he has done so with flourishes, especially analogies—metaphors, actually, if you want to give his crafted, purposeful comparisons their literary name.
The article’s headline, “Particle Accelerators Full of Spin and Fury, Signifying Something ,” invokes but recasts the title of the Nobel laureate William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury . Faulkner in turn was alluding to Shakespeare’s Macbeth :
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
To begin elucidating the speculation about what Fermilab and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider might eventually signify, Overbye opens with a gambling metaphor:
In the sidewalk con game known as three-card monte, you have to try to follow one of three cards (the red ace, say) as a dealer shuffles them back and forth face down. It’s easy until you actually put down money, and suddenly all your guesses are wrong.
Physics, lately, has felt a little bit like that. The world is presently blessed with two competing particle accelerators smashing together subatomic particles, and several thousand physicists sifting the debris, in search of new laws of nature. The last year has seen a plethora of rumors and hints of what would be big discoveries if they hold up: bumps in the data signifying new elementary particles or forces, among other things, and “now you see it, now you don’t” rumors of sightings of the long-sought Higgs boson, famously said to be responsible for imbuing other particles with mass.
Overbye reports that “physicists have been turning over cards like crazy,” that “so far, the ace is still missing,” and that some “potential discoveries have disappeared,” but that “some physicists now think they may know which card the Higgs is hiding under—though they disagree on when it will finally be turned over.”
According to a betting Web site, “the odds on the Higgs boson’s being discovered this year went from 12 to 1 all the way down to 3 to 1,’ he adds.
Overbye closes with a passage that begins, “Knowing the mass of the Higgs boson would not only confirm a great gamble on how nature works ... but also give physicists a clue where to look for evidence of a deeper theory of physics.” The passage ends where the article began, with three-card monte: “But the ace of dark matter has not shown up, leading some physicists to worry that nature has conned them 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 published in ‘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.
