Is that God's particle, professor?

4 Jul 2012, 8:54 pm   -   Source: AAP

Reporting on a conference about particle physics is difficult when your understanding of physics starts and ends with slinkies.

I panicked whenever the physicists started clapping.

Did it mean they had found something?

It was hard to tell, the applause was usually preceded by something about di-photons or four-leptons.

I flicked through my explanatory press notes.

The graphs did not help; they featured squiggly lines with axes labelled "Weighted events/ (1.67 GeV)".

Hundreds of physicists had flocked to Melbourne to hear whether a scientific breakthrough had taken place in Geneva.

As a reporter, my knowledge of physics started and ended with slinkies.

My anxiety must have been obvious.

"Don't worry," a visiting US professor said kindly. "I'm live-blogging an explanation."

I was relieved for the three minutes it took me to click through to the Quantum Diaries blog and find Ken Bloom's live blog feed.

Then panic again: "The ZZ and gamma gamma joint significance is 5.0 standard deviations," Ken's blog explained.

Unhelpful.

This was all taking place in the Melbourne Convention Centre on a wintery Wednesday night, henceforth to be celebrated by scientists as a historic evening.

Team leaders from two groups of scientists working in Geneva were presenting the findings of the latest round of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider to find a particle believed to be the elusive Higgs bosun, or so-called God particle.

The assembly of scientists were buzzing with excitement.

I was just trying to take notes while Googling fermionic particles.

In the week leading up to the announcement the physicists had been working hard to make the information transparent for the media.

One likened the mystery particle to guests at a cocktail party and the popular hostess a "particle of matter".

She gains mass as the Higgs boson guests gather around her (hoping for a drink?).

At least they know how to get journalists' attention.

By the end of two 45-minute speeches there was back-slapping, enthusiastic applause and a few tears.

"It is wonderful to be at a physics event where there is applause like there is at a football game," one physicist said.

I sent a quick email to the bureau saying I think they had made a discovery.

Luckily, the director of CERN, Europe's Centre for Nuclear Research, Rolf Heuer, was at hand.

"As a layman I think we have it," he said.

That was good enough for me.

He continued: "But as a scientist I have to say what do we have?"

But as a layman, I don't have to worry about that.

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