Stephen Colbert spreads some Higgs boson “truthiness”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0191
Comedy Central’s faux-conservative fake-news anchor Stephen Colbert has added some humor to this week’s public discussion of the latest news in the Higgs boson search.
Colbert used the New York Times article “ Data hint at hypothetical particle, key to mass in the universe ,” in which Dennis Overbye summarizes the news this way:
Physicists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., say they have found a bump in their data that might be the long-sought Higgs boson, a hypothesized particle that is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.
The signal, in data collected over the last several years at Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator, agrees roughly with results announced last December from two independent experimental groups working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, outside Geneva.
Overbye explains that scientists from the LHC’s Atlas and CMS detectors “reported that they had found promising bumps in their data at masses of 124 billion electron volts and 126 billion electron volts, respectively,” and that Fermilab’s CDF and DZero scientists “have found a broad hump in their data in the same region, between 115 billion and 135 billion electron volts.”
A similar Washington Post piece quotes CDF’s Rob Roser: “Globally the world is starting to see a consistent picture. I don’t think there’s any place for the Higgs to hide. We’ll know the answer one way or another by the end of 2012.”
Colbert , like his colleague Jon Stewart of the fake-news Daily Show, has engaged physics—and has kidded physicists—in the past. This time some of his humor was unintentional.
On 7 March, Colbert reported that electrons—he specified them twice—not only smash into each other in the LHC, but “have struck the physicists’ funny bone.” Himself obviously unfamiliar with electrons’ exclusion from the category hadron, Colbert played to the audience’s likely Higgs unfamiliarity by feigning an insider’s grasp of this line from Overbye, which he quoted:
[The news] has led to a joke in physics circles now: The Higgs boson has not been discovered yet, but its mass is 125 billion electron volts.
Chortling and smirking in a mock-knowing way, Colbert mock-explained to his studio audience, “It’s funny because two independent particle accelerators had correlating bumps in their data sets.” Then he feigned sudden recognition that no one got the joke, and observed that you probably had to be there.
Colbert is known for coining the word truthiness —the belief in the superiority of intuition and feeling over logic, facts, and analysis. By this reporter’s intuition and feeling, Colbert’s Higgs sketch seemed a plus for physics outreach.
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.