Last week’s no-news-in-physics-can-still-be-news event,  the teasingly optimistic but inconclusive progress report on the hunt for the mass-moderating Higgs boson from CERN and its Large Hadron Collider, spawned several essays in popular media worth a look. Some surely even have merit. I’m undecided which to hitch myself to. The first of these is by a journalist. The others not. Editors give public intellectuals more slack than they accord mere staff scriveners and  freelance reporters who don’t make their real living in the academy. Most of these professors’ stories below, were they submitted by lay writers, would have been covered in questions and demands for dropping the jargon and for explanations mere mortals could understand.

1) First up is a ruminative piece at Scientific American by the provocative old-time science writer, John Horgan, who ties the news to the idea that gained him great notoriety 15 years ago and is stated plainly in the title of his 1996 book, “The End of Science.” That was a remarkable work, effective and entertaining even while demanding that readers apply some common sense as antidote. The idea was that the main elements of how the universe works have been grasped, and that few if any additional fundamental revolutions in science are likely. We’ve listed and characterized chemical elements, charted the main particles of matter and the carriers of forces, embraced evolution and natural selection, have the age of the universe well-determined, and we even know what we don’t know fairly well and have labels for things yet to be determined such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy (actually, Horgan’s book preceded dark energy, but one can squeeze it in to Horgan’s world view too). Biology and health are not fully understood, but only due to their complexity. The rule books of chemistry and physics that govern living systems are known. We’re just filling in blanks, not likely to erase much or add whole new things, etc etc.   Horgan’s book consisted of a train of engrossing vignettes in which he confronted luminaries of science with his proposition. Nearly all rejected it. He somehow turned that rejection on its head to imply he had it right yet several of the greatest minds of our time don’t. The book may not have provided much reason to believe its thesis but its writer did get portraits of the various, agitated scientists who rejected it. That may have been Horgan’s real purpose. (for more on this interpretation, see my review of his book that ran first in the SF Chronicle, and which lives on thanks to the stubborn immortality of the web).

Such wry chutzpah enlivens this piece on the Higgs. Horgan is  now director of a center for science writing at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He also is author of an imminently upcoming book “The End of War” that makes one wonder if Steven Pinker beat him to a punch (here’s Horgan’s own, positive review of Pinker’s “Better Angels” tome).  Horgan’s article on the Higgs updates his End of Science thinking by citing his involvement in the Long Now Foundation, and the bets – with real money – has had made and still believes in and that assert that no Theory of Everything will be found any time soon. The readers’ comments are a particularly striking mix of polysyllabic drivel and the occasional brilliant remark.

2) Another essay, with a wholly different flavor and a wonderful word that leads to an evn better word, is in India’s Daily Hindu (Correction – see comment and thank you) make that the Times of India) by Sunil Khilnani and running under the hed  The greatest mystery.  Khilnani is a bona fide intellectual: Delhi-born, former professor at Johns Hopkins, and now director of the  India Institute at King’s College London. He knows how to throw language around. While offering the Higgs quest as a sublime illustration of scientific progress, a tone opposite to Horgan’s, he mentions that the scientific method has a fundamental paradox: “The more one breaks the material world down into its constituent elements, the more elusive it becomes to pinpoint what it’s actually made of.” Oh my, reductive science as trivial pursuit? Perhaps – for in the next paragraph he writes, “Where then, does the mass of an object come from? What gives the universe its quiddity?” Holy moly, quiddity!! What a choice, and yes I had to look it up to be sure I knew its meaning, which I mostly did not. It is a yin yang word, denoting primarily the fundamental distinctive property of any given thing, while alternatively meaning “quibble.” As in meaningless detail. Word fans, that’s only the half of it. In my gigantic old Merriam-Webster unabridged quiddity’s definition includes this: “See haecceity.” Heck-say-what? I’d never heard the word. It says here  it has roots in Latin and French, with meanings that include thisness. So, if ever one fears that quiddity will be taken by readers as too commonplace or even cliche, keep haecceity on standby as contingency.

Anyway, back to Khilnani’s essay. One presumes it runs in other outlets but I cannot find it anywhere else. It manages to take the uncertain results from CERN and turn them into a discussion of scientific method, the perils of reductionism, the necessity of beliefs that do not depend of scientific method, and what he twice calls the method’s “intellectual rampage.” That, plus the Euro zone crisis and “scientism’s imperiousness.” This is rich stew.

Other aftershocks of the big Higgs maybe:

• Newsweek/Daily Beast – Martin Rees: Higgs Boson Might Yield Origins of Universe But Questions Remain; Rees is, of course, a noted astronomer, writer of popular books, and gov’t adviser in the UK. In taking the broadest possible perspective on the Higgs hunt, Rees may also be providing ammunition for John Horgan. That is, it is getting exceedingly difficult in physics to find anything really new.  But he explicitly rejects that interpretation when he writes, “..unification would not be the end of science; indeed, we could still be near the beginning.”
• Newsweek/Daily Beast – Lisa Randall: How the Higgs Boson Could Change the Universe ; Another ringer as author – Randall is a theoretical and particle physicist of high public profile at Harvard University. Lots of physics and maybes in this. One sampling to reveal a fine simile: “When electricity was discovered, no one knew the globe would be fairly quickly blanketed with lightbulbs.” She points out that while confirmation of the Higgs would be spectacular vindication of contemporary science, failure to find it would bode far better for science yet to come.
• The Guardian (UK) Jon Butterworth: Higgs boson in massless-particle coupling shock, and other stories/If the Higgs boson is responsible for the mass of fundamental particles, how can we see it via massless photons? And what is it doing on stage in Hammersmith anyway?” ; The author is a member of the LHC’s ATLAS collaboration, one of two teams whose results were so deliciously ambiguous last week. The column is entertaining and, apropos of the slack to which I referred in this post’s opening, has lines no journalist could get in. Editors would look fishy eyeed at me if I ever trotted past with “In the summer, the “hint” was in the WW decay mode of the Higgs. For reasons I described here, this mode is not very good for telling us the mass of any candidate Higgs boson there might be. The neutrinos, from the decaying W bosons, carry away too much information that we don’t see“. Uh huh.

- Charlie Petit

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