![]() Nobody doubts that the 40 TeV Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas would have discovered the Higgs boson a decade before CERN. And yet the tools required to prove or disprove certain hypotheses often require significant amounts of money.įive-thousand miles southwest of Geneva, just outside Waxahachie, Texas, are the remnants of a super collider whose energy and circumference-true to American sensibility-would have dwarfed those of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. People have to trust physicists more than ever before, a tall order considering the arcane nature of theoretical science. ![]() Many physicists condemned the announcement as sensational, a swat at the hard reality of modern experimental physics, which is forevermore Big Science: a political animal of bureaucracy, real estate, diplomacy, rhetoric, and tax-based funding. Most physicists were incredulous, and rightfully so, as the “superluminal” neutrinos turned out to be an artifact of miswired fiber optics and a bad atomic clock. If the phenomenon was real, almost all we knew about physics would crumble. A year before, a team of physicists at CERN announced the observation of neutrinos rushing faster than the speed of light. History has shown them the political consequences of premature announcements. ![]() The conference room then reassumed its churchlike sobriety. Mild applause ensued, a man removed his glasses and dabbed a handkerchief at his tears. That summer, at the official announcement in Geneva, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the stately director general of CERN, declared “I think we have it.” It was an enormous scientific discovery-arguably one of the biggest of the 21 st century, a claim bolstered by its recent Nobel Prize award-but the celebration, on the whole, was restrained. Eventually their reticence suffused the name of the particle itself, as it was quickly described as a Higgs- like particle. Most were reluctant to claim outright that what they’d observed at the CERN particle collider in Geneva was indeed the elusive Higgs, the subatomic particle that could explain how all matter acquires mass. When the discovery of the last particle in the Standard Model of physics, the Higgs boson, was announced in the spring of 2012 many physicists, afflicted by an anxiety special to their profession, soon began hedging that same announcement.
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