Indoor Fireworks

CERN announced that its next "scientific seminar" (read: live-streamed press conference) will take place on July 4, where ATLAS and CMS will announce the preliminary results of their 2012 data analysis. The stakes are pretty high, since the December data left many people with the impression that the Standard Model Higgs would be confirmed at a mass of 125 GeV, or else point to physics beyond the Standard Model: as I've mentioned before, this--despite its lack of immediate discovery--is an especially tantalizing possibility for physicists who suspect that moving our current scientific framework outside of the SM would yield really exciting, even revolutionary (and certainly Nobel-worthy) new knowledge about the particular makeup of the universe.

Importantly, if CERN presents data that hints at a BSM Higgs, this does not imply that the Higgs does not exist. Dennis Overbye, a writer I really admire, sort of missed the mark here when he writes that "If the December signal fades, it probably means that the Higgs boson, at least as physicists have envisioned it for the past 40 years, does not exist, and that theorists have to go back to their drawing boards." The Higgs can certainly still exist as physicists envision it--but outside of the SM parameters. A different set of search strategies will be implemented, more powerful particle smashing will occur, and science's most famous scavenger hunt will continue. (If you want to read more about this, Matt Strassler, as always, breaks it down with accuracy and patience.)

In any case, excitement is high, and the folks convening next week in Melbourne for the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) probably have little else on their minds. It's all Higgs all the time these days, since the LHC is running even better than expected (thank you, experimentalists and engineers), and everyone wants to know whether the Standard Model will be upheld. Rumors have been swirling online for weeks that the 2012 data will support the 2011 numbers, and I'm inclined to believe them. In Sharon Traweek's excellent anthropological text Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High-Energy Physicists, she notes that information passed informally among peers (outside of publication, even in Letters) is often influential and accurate; compound that with the Internet (which physicists love to boast they invented) and apocryphal headlines like Overbye's ("New Data on Elusive Particle Shrouded in Secrecy") makes me think that CERN is about ready to pop the champagne. This absolutely does not mean that irrefutable proof of a 125 GeV Higgs is at hand: it will still take years to understand the particle and its implications. But it would guarantee funding for probably decades to come, and will bolster efforts to discover even more exotic particles at more elusive energies. The Higgs has become a sort of celebrity representative of the many exciting theories in HEP, and in some ways, allowing the fever of the Higgs "hunt" to subside may pave the way for scientists to focus on even more profound potential discoveries like supersymmetry and the makeup of dark matter.

Personally, I think celebrating the biggest international achievement in the history of science is a poetic way to spend our independence day, and maybe even a kick in the pants to our own government to fund high-energy physics on a competitive scale. Fermilab and Brookhaven are important but outdated; our research universities aren't attracting the talent they used to; and open-access publishing makes it less imperative that scientists be in a certain place doing a certain kind of physics. The US, instead of spending trillions of dollars pursuing pointless wars (at home and abroad), should invest in the kind of future that could sustain us, and inspire us, for generations: let's redefine the historical import behind those fireworks. The indoor kind is so much better.

Eros & Psyche

In the spirit of the holiday, eat some chocolate and feast your pheromone-addled minds on these: Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance by Dennis Overbye and Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss. Then spend some time gazing at Canova's "Eros and Psyche" (or "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss") which is, I think, the most romantic sculpture of all time. The beauty, the tragedy, the science: your hearts will pound.

Hooray for Physics!

With beams (finally!) colliding at 7 TeV, this week marks the start of real physics at the LHC, and for particle physicists and scientific optimists all over the world, brings the possibility of imminent groundbreaking discovery. Dennis Overbye calls it a "remarkable comeback for CERN", John Conway writes that this "clearly marks the beginning, at long last, of the first major physics run of the new accelerator," and NewScientist reports that "record LHC collisions mark new era for physics."

CERN is giddy: Rolf Heuer, General Director, writes "A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication has started to pay dividends...the LHC has a real chance over the next two years of discovering supersymmetric particles, and possibly giving insights into the composition of about a quarter of the Universe." ATLAS spokeswoman, Fabiola Gianotti, said "With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson." See here for the latest mind-blowing videos and images from the LHC. This era is an awesome one, in the most literal sense.

Get up to speed on all the implications of a successful LHC run: The Little Book of String Theory by Steven Gubser; The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider by Don Lincoln; Collider: The Search for the World's Smallest Particles by Paul Halpern; Einstein's Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe by Evalyn Gates.

Back to the Future: Part Higgs

Eminent theoretical physicist Holger Bech Nielsen has captured the collective imagination of late by proposing things like "a particle physics model with the property that probabilities for events in the near future (say, time t1) of an "initial" state (say, time t0) depend globally on the action for complete spacetime histories, including the parts of them further in the future than t1. The usual simplification, where we in practice consider (and sum over) only the parts of histories between spatial hypersurfaces t0 and t1 does not apply. This gives rise to a form of backward causation. Things like branching ratios for events here and now can depend of the ways the various alternatives can be constinued to later times. Events involving Higgs production, such as the running of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are the leading candidates for such effects in their model." Or, as Dennis Overbye writes, "A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

Needless to say, I find the idea of a Higgs imbued with sentience enough to travel back in time and stop its own creation via LHC--in order to save this universe--stupifyingly awesome. Suddenly, we face a situation where the simulation becomes the real (Ender's Game, anyone?), where mankind's attempt to re-create an unstable primordial atmosphere to uncover the meaning of life (or, at least, of mass) can be manipulated, where the Higgs in the photograph starts to fade and the $9 billion spent on the LHC alone becomes an endeavor thwarted by a mischievous scalar elementary particle. Sean Carroll, though, employs his hefty intellect to put our minds at ease, saying that "the theory is undeniably crazy--but not crackpot, which is a distinction worth drawing." So, you're saying there's a chance?

An apt mantra (and not for the first time) when confronted with teasers like this--be in it in science, politics, medicine, love: "You remember this: they never tell you any more truth than they have to."

Science and Democracy

Dennis Overbye for the Science Times: "Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth."

Peter Steinberg and Ken Bloom at CERN react; Adam Frank, author of The Constant Fire, Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate talks to Melissa Lafsky at Discover (part I and part II). This is a debate that will go on, most likely, forever: regardless of how many amazing and fundamental truths are revealed in this eon of scientific exploration, I doubt that any TOE will encompass "God created the Earth and everything in it, including quantum physics." (Right off the bat, wouldn't that theory need to be revised to include the universe and everything in it? Or, rather, multiverse...)

I will admit that religion has its place, and has historically contributed both good and ill to developing societies. However, it's high time that religion admit to being less viable as The Great Explainer of Life--or at least separately viable--and allow science to move forward without today's myriad attempts to bamboozle. (I'm looking at you, intelligent design.)

To quote Einstein: "It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for what this delicate little plant needs more than anything, besides stimulation, is freedom."