It?s rare indeed for a highly-technical scientific discovery, one with little practical significance to everyday life, to be trending on Facebook and Twitter, traditionally the domain of the youth. It is also extremely rare for the announcement of a scientific discovery to resemble a rock concert, with people camping out overnight to witness it. But those are perhaps the best non-scientific examples of how significant CERN?s announcement yesterday?that it had near-conclusive proof of the existence of a new particle in the area where the Higgs boson was postulated to be?really is. Many scientists say that this discovery, if it does prove to be the Higgs, could be as significant as the moon landing of the 1960s. The Higgs provides the last missing link in the prevailing theory of how the universe works, the Standard Model, and sets the groundwork for a more complex theory that includes the presence of the enigmatic dark energy and dark matter. But there is more to CERN?s efforts than just the scientific value: experimental physics, and science overall, long the preserve of ?nerds? and ?geeks?, has suddenly become ?cool?. That is no mean feat, and could in fact be a far more significant shift in the world of science than any single discovery could be.
No doubt shows like The Big Bang Theory, where one of the most beloved characters is an experimental physicist, and popular science books like The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Big Bang have rendered even the most indifferent into budding science fans, but it takes real-world discoveries for that interest to really bloom. And CERN?s Large Hadron Collider hasn?t disappointed. In its search for the God Particle (itself as sexy a search as you can get), CERN came up with other discoveries that shook the world?the most prominent being its supposed discovery of faster-than-light neutrinos. Something that proves Einstein wrong was surely going to fire the youth?s imagination. That discovery was subsequently proved to be an error, but the fire had been lit. CERN?s announcement yesterday has stoked that flame, a job well done.
