I should declare an interest at the outset: I am a big fan of the Large Hadron Collider, and in complete awe of its purpose.
There is a story (true, I'm told) of an American physicist appearing before an Senate appropriations committee a while back to seek approval of funding for an atom smasher who was asked whether the machine would contribute to the defence of the USA. The scientist responded: No, Senator; but it would make it just that bit more worth defending. The cash was not forthcoming.
No such problems at CERN these days – though there have been plenty of others. Jim Al-Khalali's programme for the BBC last night brought all this to mind. Al-Khalili – the thinking man's Brian Cox (though I quite like him on The Infinite Monkey Cage) – did the voice over on an Horizon special which looked at where the LHC is in its search for the Higgs boson: looking good for a mass of 125 GeV, it seems. Jim didn't leave the country, and thankfully there were no shots of scientists striding over mountain ranges or staring wistfully at the heavens from a sand dune, so this wasn't a normal BBC science programme. There were, however, lots of high-speed whooshings round CERN's rings, much copper cable on display (I hope their security is tight), and some very pretty diagrams and screenshots. I thought the timelines the most effective and rather guiltily liked the animated dinosaurs. But it was the quite ordinary blokes (not many women at CERN it would seem) who were apparently the scientists who stole the show for me with their quite ordinary ambitions and feelings; and you felt you'd actually be able to talk to them yourself.
I cannot decide which is the more admirable – the technology and human intelligence and nous on display at CERN in both the machines and the people, or our enlightenment values that let to its being built in the first place. A close run thing.
When Higgs is vindicated, and the boson set is complete, maybe Jim (or Brian) will explain just how the Higgs field continues to exist under ordinary conditions when the particle doesn't.
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