The Tracker’s pulse arose a bit this morning on seeing this hed on a Reuters story by Robert Evans, from Geneva: “Big Bang” collider may reveal mystery particle. Oh boy, something really bizarrely new in its sights? No – same old same old, the Higgs, the usual suspect in the hunt for good reasons to have built the grand machine. Evans got an interview with CERN’s head of communications (a trained physicist, we learn from a scout around the web). Not that finding the Higgs would be no big deal, and not that it has no mystery associated with it, but it’s a well-known garden variety mystery. This is like hearing there are reports of a mystery creature in the UK – and then learning it’s just Nessie. Evans’s story, by the way, is not couched to raise hopes beyond the usual hopes – it’s the hed that does that. The story apparently arose as a sideline to other LHC news on refinement in plans to ramp up to full power (not for two years at least).  Reuters does not much advance the ball on the Higgs, and provides little clue to readers what it  might be other than something that endows matter with gravitational mass. This further makes me wonder, entirely idly – is it ever sensible to imagine matter that has inertial mass but no gravitational field?

I am grateful however for the Reuters story. Searching about for more, recent LHC news uncovered a diverting piece from a few days ago. It is at the specialty news site PhysOrg.com. This is a private science news outlet based in the UK. There, science writer Lisa Zyga reports Physicists Investigate Possibility of an ‘Unhiggs. This one fascinates. Ms. Ziga confidently allows into her story such terms as invariant mass, superposition, and non-zero vacuum expectation value. It is not clear she is merely quoting such terms rather than understanding their gist but it adds up. This site aims at an unusually narrow slice of the already minority share of the public considered scientifically literate. Her story is not bad for any writer, even more so for someone who, her staff bio reports, was an undergraduate major in rhetoric.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.