full of time-travelling wasps the size of a billionth of an electron and you get some kind of an idea of it.
How to prove the existence of the Werninghaus Meson? – what physicists are already calling, no really this one definitely is the God particle. A much larger, more expensive piece of equipment will be required, this time the size of the M25, and engineered to one billion-billionth of a metre’s accuracy. It’ll provide employment for a whole new generation of physicists wandering around underground in white coats clutching clipboards like in all those Bond films.
Perched on plywood seats at long Formica tables, earnest young researchers swig beer and argue over the minutiae of particle physics. As the LHC reaches readiness, the air of expectation is palpable.
“In a way we are in a perfect situation,” says Dr Jo Cole of Britain’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and a leading worker in the CMS experiment hall.
“Either we prove the theoreticians are right and help in the garnering of Nobel prizes. Or we will show they were wrong. We will have found something else that is new and exciting, and will have overturned accepted science.”
The intriguing point is that most Cern scientists, if given the choice, would probably plump for the “wrong” scenario. Yes, it would be great to beat the Americans to the Higgs, but it would be even better if Cern found that Higgs did not exist at all, or that it came with a whole new class of sister particles that had never been predicted by theorists.
You see? They can’t lose. It’s a scam.
Says Evans: “I will happily bet a month’s salary, which admittedly is not very much, that we will have thrown up whole new fields of physics within two years of switching on the LHC.”
It’s not a machine for discovering truths about the universe: it’s a machine for generating employment for physicists. And the guy’s even got the nerve to drop in a complaint about his salary.
[On a similar theme, here’s what I wrote a while back.]
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