Everyone's a Theoretical Physicist now...

This week, wherever you look in the media, there's a story on the Higgs Boson.

Professor Giggs
Theoretically a Physicist?

(This also being the week that Sky announced its misguided intention to create a chat show called "On the Couch with Peter Crouch". Doubtless some Sky commissioning editor is right now considering a new programme called, "Discover the Higgs, with Ryan Giggs"...)

Years ago, before TV, Social Media, i-pads and the like, if a scientist made some wonderful discovery, he or she would inform their peers and publish 'a paper'. This would then be examined and, if the scientists's findings were accepted, then the discovery would be duly noted and authorised and could then be used in industry, medicine or whatever field it related to. Excellent approach; and one adopted even by recent 'celebrity' scientists from Einsten through to Peter Higgs himself.

Lately, it has become almost impossible to keep scientific discovery (or, indeed, anything) a secret. Tim Berners-Lee - the man credited with having invented the internet - hoist all scientists with this petard, in a way. News of notable events in science are whizzes around the web at something approaching the speed of light, like when the CERN pointy-heads thought they'd detected a particle travelling slightly faster than that a few weeks ago (or, possibly, next week). In the old days, their 'discovery' would have been tested to death before publication and they wouldn't have had to climb down in ignomony. I mean, Duh! Everyone knows that nothing can travel faster than light, and what they detected was a massless particle not dissimilar to a neutrino, which is about as close to nothing as you can get, but not actually nothing...so, something, then, and therefore slower?

The Standard Model - supposedly "Elementary" - But looks very difficult, really...

And that's part of the problem. The internet and the media that ride on it can provide almost everyone with information on just about everything within seconds. Inevitably, this means that almost everyone professes to be an expert on just about everything.

Take the Higgs Boson. Suddenly, from nowhere, there are experts. In every newspaper and on every radio and TV station, someone pops up to helpfully explain a) what a boson is, b) why it's called 'Higgs' and c) what its discovery means to everyone and everything. And I'm prepared to have a little wager that the research done to inform these articles (like this one) and news items probably didn't get a lot further than Wikipedia. And, of course, the Daily Mail reckoned that the discovery of the Higgs Boson would have an alarming impact on house prices in the Home Counties and that the Boson itself will give everyone cancer. The Daily Express  has concluded that Princess Diana was not, after all, killed by the Duke of Edinburgh, but by an attack of gluons and bosons, egged on by top and bottom quarks.

When something really complicated like this hits the airwaves, it is necessary to bring on an expert that is able to trump all other experts; one that is so believable, eloquent and telegenic, that all of the other scientists appear as mumbling morons in his shadow. Professor Brian Cox. He's amazing. It didn't actually matter what he said, either. Even just answering some simple questions in an interview (rather than gazing longingly into space or leaping from a helicopter into the grand canyon) his inferred gravitas was enough to convince the world of anything at all; even that Ed Miliband is a credible, leader of the Opposition or that George Osborne can do sums. But Cox was very cautious about the discovery of the Higgs Boson. In fact, he wasn't convinced that it had been discovered at all. None of the pointy-heads are, to be fair. All they have is a signature that suggests, in all probability, that something like the Higgs was present for one billionth of a billionth of a second after some photons had collided. But come on, Brian, just pretend for a minute that it's definitely the Higgs...what does that mean?

Professor Brian Cox taunts and confuses an old man - sort of restorative justice then?

Cox is non-comittal. All that has happened, apparently, is that these scientists have just scoped out the landscape that might enable us to understand how the Higgs works. It seems that the Higgs boson thing, in theory, is the glue / custard / woolly scarf / magic / scary-thing, that creates / defines / holds / expands / destroys the universe (delete as appropriate to the newspaper you have read).

So, in essence, nothing has really happened and it will be some time before (maybe never) we'll be able to build a starship and ride on a wave of bosonic, quarky, muony stuff using lepton-photon drive to explore the vastness of the universe and boldy split our infinitives where no man has been gramatically incorrect before. Shame, really...

In the meantime, Channel 5 has commissioned the following new shows:

Dark Matter, with Sepp Blatter

The Tau Neutrino, with Ronaldinho

The Hadron Collider, with Wesley Sneijder

Universal Expansion, with Alan Hansen
Name That Widget! With Steven Bridgett

Etc...