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Today CERN and FERMILAB announced 5σ confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson [1], inspiring a burst of heady live coverage from the Guardian. (CERN had leaked a video about the discovery the day before, so everyone knew what was coming, and turned up for today’s Higgs seminar. All of the scientists who had worked on early versions of the theory that pointed towards such a boson also flew in the the seminar, which continues tomorrow.)
CERN has posted and archived beautiful 360-degree photos of the day, a video of the press conference (rather dull), and will soon post a recording of the day’s seminar (which was live-streamed and amazing; come back for it tomorrow).
The media as usual tries valiantly to explain things in a down-to-earth way that is both simplistic and true, but is generally failing. As with a few other recent scientific breakthroughs, I am grateful that Wikipedia offers solid explanations of the topics at hand, and through the magic of hyperlinks (which news agencies are still struggling with 🙂 allows exploration of the topics in as much depth as you like.
Related reading: supersymmetry, scalar field theory, htlhcdtwy.
[1] Note the careful, conservative trend in particle physics: the labs making the discovery are all quick to say they’ve discovered the existence of at least one new particle, which matches the profile of the Higgs boson; it could be one or more of its sibling bosons that have been discovered – supersymmetry suggests there could be 5 of them.
”The media as usual tries valiantly to explain things in a down-to-earth way that is both simplistic and true, but is generally failing.” I agree with that.
Often I have noticed that the media is profit motivated. And since profits come from a bigger readership, they simplify their writing for readers, majority whom read at 8th grade level.
However, in the cause of doing this, solid explanations are often missed, the writer’s opinion is often taken as scientific evidence and in depth coverage is sacrificed.
Comment by James Abugah 07.04.12 @ 3:10 pm