Internet rumors of Higgs boson - TIME
For days, now, the Web has been sizzling with news that the long-sought Higgs boson — the particle that theorists think gives other particles their mass — might have been discovered at last. The Higgs, also known as the "God Particle," was evidently hiding in a bunch of subatomic debris, like a robbery suspect crouching in a dumpster, at the European Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. Such astonishing news hasn't been heard in the physics community since ... last year, actually. That's the most recent time the Higgs might have been discovered (but wasn't) — in this case, at the Tevatron accelerator near Chicago. A month or so ago, meanwhile, an entirely different but equally amazing particle, which could have rewritten the laws of physics might have been discovered at Tevatron (but as far as we know, it wasn't).
If there seems to be a theme here, there is — and it's not that particle physicists love to make dramatic claims for which there's no actual evidence. The truth is that making discoveries at the very edge of physics is really hard (if it were easy, after all, we'd already have made them). That's why you need multi-billion-dollar accelerators that whip particles nearly to the speed of light, or giant telescopes keeping station in space. And even then, the observations are so difficult to make that it's not always clear what you're looking at. Is that teeny blip of light the most distant galaxy ever seen, or is it a glitch in the electronics? (See "Why the Collider Matters: In Search of the 'God Particle.'")
Questions like that are incredibly difficult to answer, and with particle physics they're even harder, because you're not even looking for the thing itself, you're looking for the effect of the thing — the suspicious movement of the tall grass as [...]
'The God particle' makes it sound as though there is one magical bit of Universe to be found that will explain everything, and I find it interesting that science feels this is a different dynamic to believing in any religious god. Of course there is 'a God' - it is every person, place, thing, and idea in existence - but nothing is truly supernatural. A wise friend of mine once said, "Magic is only that which science has yet to explain" (or something very like that; it was a long time ago but you get the gist), which is true. We're never going to rule out things like ghosts and aliens and psychic phenomena, we're only going to change how those things are understood and what they're called (like what used to be called 'female hysteria' now being called PMS, PMDD, schizophrenia, epilepsy, anxiety and any number of other much more specific and potentially useful diagnoses). And one day, everything in the Universe (such as it is, being a single infinite point in a momentary eternal prescient memory) will have been cataloged, categorized, and classified by humanity, at which point we will become pointless, and while I would expect our disappearance from this planet we inhabit and wherever else we colonize along the way would be gradual in our terms and probably incomplete, with pockets surviving and evolving and becoming any number of post-human-type beings, in the whole of eternity our entire millions-, billions-, trillions-of-years-long existence will have been but a blip. (Hopefully we'll have come to understand by then that being but a blip doesn't mean we're insignificant; quite the contrary, without us none of this would exist. For us. :)) (Which of course wouldn't matter 'cause we wouldn't exist to care. :D)