What brings me to my office where I have access to a computer to write this post on the 4th of July is a constellation of idiosyncratic personality quirks...He-he-he, no not really.
What brings me here to write this post is the discovery by physicists of a new boson...No, really.
This is the most important public occurrence in the world today and in many days. Why? Because it may be the Higgs boson. Wait, wait,waitwaitwait. If it's the Higgs boson (and to a "five sigma" level of certainty it is!) then that explains why hot dogs, fireworks, computers, and people exist, like you and me "people." How? Because the Higgs would explain how all those things have mass and without mass there'd just be electrons and stuff flying past each other at the speed of light. Something had to slow all that stuff down and get it to coalesce into hot dogs. Peter Higgs, a University of Edinburg scientist, first theorized this slowing, coalescing boson's existence in 1964.
Scientists have been looking for the Higgs boson for decades (it's invisible so they couldn't find it, or maybe "looking" isn't the applicable verb). Scientists have been trying to detect the Higgs for decades. Over 1,000 are involved in the current project at CERN (Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Geneva where today's discovery was announced. The way that they were trying to detect the Higgs was by running subatomic particles around a racetrack for subatomic particles (the "Large Hadron Collider") and crashing them into each other. In the debris produced by the collisions they found the Higgs (or something like it) today (image above). The LHC really is large: 17 miles in circumference. An even bigger subatomic racetrack which was to have been 54 miles around, called the Superconducting Super Collider, was being built in Texas ("Super:" Of course, it would be in Texas, "everything is bigger in Texas.") but the Republicans killed it in 1993.
The search for the Higgs has cost zillions of dollars and euros and employed thousands of scientists over the years. To some, a better answer to the question "How do we even exist?" constitutes a "practical effect" of all that money and person-hours. To others like the Republicans who killed the SSC, it doesn't. Okay, the internet came about as a result of the communications needs of the collaborating scientists; Stephen Hawking lost a $100 bet; Peter Higgs (84 years old) may now win the Nobel Prize. Nope, that won't get it done "on the bottom line." You can't justify the expense and manpower of "pure" science on immediate practical effects. Discovery, knowing, is the only justification. That's what brought me to the office today.
*Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director-General of CERN.
