[caption id="attachment_20955" align="aligncenter" width="530" caption="The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), above, and the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) are two general-purpose detectors on the Large Hadron collider. They gathered the hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data that scientists are sifting through looking for signs of the Higgs boson."]
[/caption][caption id="attachment_20956" align="aligncenter" width="483" caption="The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS)"]
[/caption]At the same time, political and sports stories find purchase just about as soon as they transpire and from almost all quarters they reach to. That science lacks the same hold has been the subject of many a technical discourse in the past. Even more: given how we're in the golden age of science journalism, many of today's stories, if not all, do a much better job of making people understand why and how science is important irrespective of their academic backgrounds. But even now, our progress is slow and difficult. In this context, as we enter an era of physics even more elegant in its complexity, an era of science as such that finally thinks itself in a position to explain everything that it encounters, journalists have an opportunity.
Windows such as this don't open often because the windows that do don't have the sort of significance and import that will get them on the front-page, that will secure them the modicum of attention required to sustain enough attention in the matter to draw questions and more interest from readers.
When Albert Einstein formulated the general and special theories of relativity, it was the beginning of a fascinating time for physics and chemistry: finally, something had been put in place that was robust and did not succumb to any probing thought experiment it was subjected to. Even though it pushed what it couldn't explain to the fringes of phenomenology, it was just as good because it consistently explained everything that we had observed and could observe - all the way from the smallest particles to the largest stars. Also the discoverer of the photoelectric effect that eventually lead to the packaging of the Standard Model, Einstein provided invaluable focus to a subject many until then couldn't comfortably approach.
[caption id="attachment_20957" align="aligncenter" width="436" caption="Particles postulated by the Standard Model of particle physics"]
[/caption]In other words, tomorrow's announcement will reveal the picture that Einstein and his successors jotted out the dots for. A definite "Yes" will seal the deal for particle physicists and provide them with the foundation necessary to explore the nature of dark matter and the origins of the universe. A definite "No" will send them scurrying back to their notes and prompt a critical scrutiny of what went wrong and how it can be fixed.
I believe that there can be not many other moments that will possess the same significance as the propsect of finding the Higgs boson presents. In fact, even its invalidation will be just as good because it will debunk the simple Higgs mechanism and force reconsideration.
[caption id="attachment_20958" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="The Higgs mechanism"]
[/caption]Simply, the Higgs boson is the protagonist in the play of particles that imparts mass to everything in this universe. To understand the mechanism with which it imparts mass, there is the oft-quoted example of a famous movie star walking into a crowded room. As he enters through the door, he gathers a group around him that slows him down in his journey through the room. The group moves with him: those he leaves behind melt away while those he moves toward come forward. Finally, when he exits the room, the group disappears, too, and the room is just crowded once more. Similarly, the Higgs boson creates a charged field around it. When particles move through this field, they acquire some mass that slows them down accordingly.
There are only a few unexplained "mysteries" in the realm of physics. The more famous amongst them are the source of gravitational forces - accounted for by the hypothetical Higgs mechanism - and the nature of dark matter. The 2011 Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist who proved that galaxies are moving farther apart not at decelerating or constant speeds but at increasing rates. This means that after the initial blow of the Big Bang, something is pushing the galaxies farther faster, and this something has been hypothesized to be dark matter.
[caption id="attachment_20960" align="aligncenter" width="475" caption="The frontiers of physics"]
[/caption]Reporting such stories is going to be different from reporting other stories because this is a frontier of physics, where it is easy to trip and fall, difficult to pick oneself back up and where almost nothing is certain. At the cutting edge, the byword has to be caution more than anything else, including interest and adventure, because of two reasons.
- Physics at the cutting-edge is inaccessible to almost everyone who's not at CERN or some other high-tech lab. In such a case, misrepresentation is misguidance magnified by the unfortunate inaccessibility.
- The farther we move into uncharted territories, into the "intergalactic atomic pea soup" as it were, the more we're assuming holds true. Think of this as a sailor who has lost his way in the sea but providentially happens to have tied his boat to a safe harbour by means of a very long rope. As he moves farther away from that harbour, the more rope he will spend in between, and more is the rope he will have to account for that has not been cut.
An interview of physicist and recent author Lisa Randall by The New York Times illustrates this seldom exercised caution in such matters by many journalists reporting the issue.
Q. What do we know about it so far?
A. Experimenters have already ruled out a large range of masses. The Higgs boson, if it exists, has to be heavier than 114.4 giga-electron volts (GeV), which are the units of mass that particle physicists use. By comparison, protons, the bedrock of ordinary matter, are about 1 giga-electron volt, and an electron is only half a million electron volts.
Based on recent searches by the L.H.C., the Higgs boson is also excluded between about 140 GeV and 500 GeV. This makes the most likely region for the Higgs mass to be between about 115 and 140 GeV, which is the range Tuesday’s results should focus on, although in principle heavier Higgs boson masses are in contention too.
I don’t want to shatter hopes, but don’t count on Tuesday’s results being definitive. This is the toughest range of masses for the L.H.C., and detection is tricky for this range. I suspect they will have enough evidence not to exclude the Higgs, but too little to fully pin it down without next year’s data.
Because of its notoriously elusive nature, the search for the Higgs boson has acquired an anthemic proportion which makes it easier for the story to be reported when the more arduous aspects of it are filtered out. It makes journalistic capitalization more accessible, which will push the twin notions of ethical science reporting and essential science reporting further apart. And where ethical science reporting accounts for the trust between the writer and the reader, essential science reporting accounts for what stories are important and therefore must be covered.
[caption id="attachment_20961" align="aligncenter" width="520" caption="Using "Don't you know who I am!" to define right and wrong where they haven't been defined can a dangerous thing."]
[/caption]Breaking a science story just because it happened somewhere and presents news-like information to a local group is not the duty of a journalist. The duty is to inform his/her readers which piece of news is more important and why. Unlike other subjects that are reported, science journalists don't have the liberty of drawing from a repetitive history to forecast the future. They can never possess the intellectual resources necessary to influence readers to repeat the past. In taking anyone forward, science journalists must guide with both the direction of each step and the distance it covers.
When the time does come for the revelation that it won't be another year before the verifications are all complete, many people will have lost interest in the subject because what they thought would've mattered to them would've happened a year ago. Instead of creating false reasons to celebrate the findings just because nobody is noticing, reporters must undertake a sustained coverage of important issues. If they don't - if we don't - then it's going to become very hard to get readers to catch up with what's going on.
[caption id="attachment_20962" align="aligncenter" width="530" caption="Context is important: it sets the tone of the story as well as determines where we're headed to."]
[/caption]As the search for the Higgs boson nears an important milestone, the interactive forces within the field highlight the importance of focusing stories on the ancillary qualities of the scientific method instead of the phenomena born thereof. For those for whom scientific principles don't mean much, for those whose readership I, the journalist, require and need to cultivate, stories with misconstructed contexts will work against my intention to bridge the gap between research and technology. Like the following anonymous quote implies,
The eye cannot see what the mind does not know
Not telling the reader something he doesn't know exists can be used both to preserve a narrow context where it may be necessary to keep away confusion and to secure personal interests and not risk public interference in the matter. The former is difficult to use, the latter is just wrong. We must carefully introduce, sustain and finish as does science: with "systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing and the modification of hypotheses."
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