WORLD'S FIRST HIGGS BOSON DENIER

Could this be an image of what the Higgs Boson might look like?... Probably not

Does this whole God Particle thing not just seem a bit fishy to you?


I know it's just a movie, but in Angels and Demons, when they use the Large Hadron Collider to capture dark matter, they bung it in a bunch of jars - a bit like when mum used to make marmalade.


Where are the jars of dark matter? That's what I want to know. I'm not saying I expected hand written labels and little gingham hats on top but I thought we'd get something. A photo. A video. A black hole causing the end of life on Earth as we know it. Something.


Instead, we seem to be more than happy to take these wonks at their word. Sure, it's not every day we see nerds of this calibre break down and cry because their alleged discovery is just so damned universe-defining, so it's pretty compelling stuff. I just have this nagging doubt they're making the whole thing up. Like the moon landings.


I mean, when was the last time science discovered something decent? Fire? That was pretty cool. Electricity? Yep, also turned out to be quite useful, and not just for scorching Ben Franklin's kites. What else? Radio waves? Where would I be without them? But dark matter? The God Particle? Higgs Boson? Who's naming this stuff? George Lucas?


Let's face facts, these guys (and they seem to be mostly guys, which is probably why it took them so long to find this thing in the first place) these guys were Science's last hope at discovering something even niftier than nuclear fission. So they spent, according to some estimates, $8.5billion building a 27km tunnel so they could smash sub-atomic particles apart, hopefully without destroying the entire planet in the process.


That's a lot of pressure to come up with the goods.


So rather than admit they'd wasted a lot of time, a great deal of money and quite a length of tunnel, I can't help wondering if they just... faked it. Who would be able to tell the difference? How many quantum physicists do you hang out with? For all we know, that silver-haired bloke welling up in the lecture theatre wasn't even called Higgs - could've just been some method actor who can cry on cue. I'm not even convinced Stephen Hawking is a real person - if I had a brain the size of a planet, why would I settle for a computer voice that sounds like something from an episode of Doctor Who? (And I'm talking Tom Baker era Doctor Who here - nothing recent) It's so weird that voice - why does it have an American accent? He was born in Oxford. Even the GPS on my phone does accents. Mind you, there's not much the magical Nokia Lumia 800 can't do. I wonder if it has a "Find the Higgs Boson" app. Probably.


And that's exactly what Science has failed to do with this thing; make it have an effect on our everyday lives. Unless we get a smarter phone or a bigger TV out of it, I don't think we'll have a lasting love affair with Higgs, or his Boson. They just haven't made anti-matter matter.

Probably doesn't look anything like this either...