QoTD: Frog's Legs & Particle Physics Edition

by: Rosi Efthim

Tue Dec 13, 2011 at 01:41:01 PM EST

Just as when Volta in the 18th century used electricity to make a frog's legs twitch and had no idea where it would lead, even esoteric and tentative research like this helps make our world richer and more understandable.                                          - Rep. Rush Holt, PhD, the only physicist in Congress

The internets have been alive the last few hours with news that physicists might have detected the elusive Higgs boson, in theory (because nobody's ever seen it), the means by which everything in the Universe obtains its mass. Basic building block of the universe. Holy grail. God particle.

This is the missing piece - or may be, when it's finally confirmed - of the Standard Model of particle physics, "instruction booklet" of how forces and particles interact. Explainer of, if not everything, then a lot of the home universe.

Chills. Really, even though the mechanics of this elude my liberal arts mind, I have chills. Not just me. A few hours ago, my favorite tweet - from a science reporter in London: Never before in the field of science journalism have so few journalists understood what so many physicists were telling them! #Higgsupdate

Rush Holt, rocket scientist, vanquisher of IBM's Watson supercomputer, and tireless advocate of science, and R & D funding is pumped up, even though he's a plasma, not particle, physics guy. And though this news comes from the Large Hadron Collider, biggest particle smasher in the world, buried in a tunnel 500 feet below the Swiss-French border, there are 2 teams of 3,000 physicists each from all over the world that have been working on this for years.

I just looked back at the draft of this diary, loaded with links. This isn't the usual kind of thing we report on, but the only physicist left in Congress lives in NJ (and used to be my boss). Sometimes science is politics.

More on the LHC, the 'Hubble telescope of inner space'.
More on physics Team Atlas.
More on physics Team Compact Muon Solenoid.

Follow @RushHolt. (and @bluejersey!)
Follow @CERN - that's European Organization for Nuclear Research, the biggest particle physics laboratory in the world.
Hashtags: #Higgsupdate #Higgs