The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da - By Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart Page 0,69

physicists know where to look.

Journalists, true to form, insisted on referring to the Higgs as the God particle, for no very sensible reason except sensational headlines. The name comes from the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Nobel prize-winning physicist Leon Ledermann. However, he wanted to call the Higgs the goddamn particle because of all the trouble it was causing. His publisher brought God into it.

This is always a dangerous tactic. It is presumably why some people with religious objectives imagine there is a link between the Higgs and their concept of God – just as some previously imagined that Stephen Hawking’s use of ‘the mind of God’ in A Brief History of Time was a theological statement rather than a metaphor. The ‘God particle’ name must surely be what inspired some hopeful doorstep missionary to claim (as reported in New Scientist) that scientists now believe in God. The evangelist’s reason – ‘They’ve found Him in the Large Hadron Kaleidoscope’ – is a dead giveaway.

Pity about ‘kaleidoscope’, of course, but that slip pales into insignificance compared to the claim that scientists now believe in God because they’ve observed the Higgs. It’s like citing the photon to prove they’ve seen the light.

Ian, being a mathematician, rather likes the standard model cake with Higgs icing, although he’d have been even happier if the Higgs had turned out not to exist, as Hawking once predicted. That would have been much more exciting. Jack, a biologist, has more misgivings. He is worried that the evidence for all fundamental particles depends on specific interpretations of the data, and the manner by which they are obtained. It’s not easy to observe a new particle: you don’t just look for it and see it, like in the old days. In particular, you spot a Higgs by the company it keeps. It doesn’t hang around long enough to be observed in its own right; instead, it decays into a complicated shower of other particles. So you have to look for the kind of shower that a Higgs would produce, and infer the presence of a Higgs.

By analogy, consider a piano, as observed by pianologists: creatures that have great facility with sound, but can’t see a piano or feel what shape it is. How would they find out what this musical instrument is made of?

Let’s allow them the ability to throw things at it. Hurling small stones would be rewarded, from time to time, by a musical note. We know this occurs when a stone hits a key, but pianologists would detect only the music. By collecting data, they would find a range of notes, with a nice mathematical structure. Clearly a piano is made from twangons of various frequencies. Experiments at higher energy would reveal a new and rather different ‘pianicle’: the slamon. (We understand that you get this by slamming the lid shut.) Now it’s got more complicated. Soon the pianino has joined the list, along with the muano, the tauano and much else.

Instead of making everything simpler, new data at higher energies has just muddied the waters. So how do pianologists propose to resolve the many theoretical issues involved? They obtain large government grants to create collisions of even higher energy. This requires erecting an LHC (Large Hotel Collapser) forty storeys high, and pushing the piano out of a top-floor window in the time-honoured fashion of visiting rock stars. The results are impressive, but hard to interpret. Careful analysis decomposes the resulting sound into a cacophony of a hundred or so different twangons, several variants of the slamon … and a bit left over. This bit, obtained by deducting from the overall sound every known component, is of course the long-sought proof of the existence of the Bigg Bashon – which journalists insist on calling the Thud pianicle, a name given to the sound created when a piano encounters a hypothetical field … or maybe a car park.

This proves that a piano has mass.

Because the procedure that confirms the new pianicle is so complex and error-prone, several billion pianos need to be launched into oblivion before the results become statistically significant. They are, and the discovery is published, months after the first experiment hit the headlines.

The big question here, which is where Ian and Jack tend to differ, though not by a lot, is whether particle physicists are misinterpreting the nature of matter in a similar way to pianologists resolutely failing to understand a piano. Bashing things