The "New" Particle

NB:  There is a joke at the end of this blog post.

Here is an article from The Washington Post on the identification of indications of the long sought Higgs boson.  The lede:

It was a triumphant moment for science:  On Wednesday in Geneva, a team of researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that they had found the elusive Higgs boson—or at least something that looks an awful lot like it.

The article tells why the discovery didn't happen in the US—well, Texas.

Physicists have been searching for evidence of the Higgs, which supposedly gives other particles their mass, for nearly half a century, ever since it was first predicted by theorists in 1964.  (Here’s a nice Higgs explainer.)  But the actual boson itself couldn’t be found until the construction of the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, which spans a 17-mile radius beneath the border of Switzerland and France.

Here’s a lesser-known fact, however.  The Higgs could have been discovered about a decade earlier—and in Texas rather than Switzerland.  Back in the 1980s, American physicists were developing a particle accelerator three times as powerful as Europe’s Large Hadron Collider.  But Congress eventually cut off funds and the project collapsed.

Investment in such things pays off in the long run, in this case for the Europeans.

All of which gives me a setup to repeat this joke.

A Higgs boson walks into a church. The priest stops the particle and says, "We don't allow your kind in here."  Undeterred the particle responds:  "But without me, you can't have mass."

Regards  —  Cliff