A “brave new world” revealed, not?!?

Over two years ago I wrote a blog entry entitled “Brave New World.” In that entry I mused about the possibilities of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, about its search for the Higgs boson and the idea that everything we know about the world can change in the blink of an eye. When the LHC was started for the first time, there was a lot of excitement going around in the physics community. Particle physicists were waiting anxiously for results to surface. However, for over two years the LHC was riddled with problems. The magnets were broken, or too strong to hold the current and other such things that spelled a serious handicap for the LHC. The friendly competitors at Fermilab, near Chicago, now had the possibility to maybe beat the folks at CERN. The Tevatron at Fermi however was closed in 2011. Results of many of the experiments however were still being analyzed and showed a definite possibility of a Higgs boson. In early July of 2012 the elusive Higgs boson, or a particle that at least had the possibilities of the Higgs, was discovered at CERN. Peter Higgs himself was present and so were many physicists and observers of the wider particle physics community.  But did Miranda’s brave new world appear?

“Brave New World”

A Brave New World that has such ‘particles’ in it. As Miranda in The Tempest looks at the people that enter the island she lives on, she is perplexed by the newness that they bring to her little, self-contained world. The physicists at CERN seem to look at every new particle they discover with the same awe and wonder. In Miranda’s case, the people she remarks upon as new are equally astonished by her and think her to be the news. Both sides are not aware that they actually come from the same area, the same background even and are way more similar than they think possible. I do not want to create a similarity between particle physicists and new particles, but part of the message of The Tempest is about discovery of something that one already knows almost inherently and that does strike me as a similarity to the research at CERN. Physicists there discover ‘new’ particles and have new insights into a universe that subsequently seems to be very alien to the world we inhabit but still is the same.