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Atomic ProseWhy can't science journalists just tell it like it is when it comes to particle physics?

By Chris WilsonPosted Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008, at 7:10 AM ET

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg once summed up his feeling about people who saw evidence of the divine in the laws of physics like so: "I don't know why they use words like 'designer' or 'God,' except perhaps as a form of protective coloration."

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God was mostly off the table in recent weeks—except in His particle form—as the Large Hadron Collider revved up for a massive series of experiments in subatomic physics. But among science journalists, there was plenty of protective coloration of another variety. Much of the prose from the hundreds of stories heralding the event arced decidedly toward the purple.

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James Owen Weatherall argued that the discovery of the Higgs boson could end up being terrible news for physics and then warned us that we may not find the Higgs at all. Noreen Malone explained what happens if you fall into a black hole, and Chris Wilson explained who could get sued if the Large Hadron Collider was responsible for that calamity. Jim Holt defended the scientist's definition of beauty.

"Here, inside the largest science experiment ever conducted, is the stuff of meditation and prayer, mysteries of the sort that only religion and Big Science can unveil with such grandeur," reported the Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders from Geneva. The Washington Post's William Booth described the accelerator's detectors as "crawling, Medusa-like, with blue, red, green cables, like arteries and veins." These, said CNN, would provide scientists the opportunity for a "religious experience"; the BBC agreed, pointing out helpfully that "scientific study is often mundane but can occasionally slip into the ecstatic." Reporting from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where scientists gathered to remotely celebrate the event, the New York Times' Dennis Overbye went for broke:

Outside, a half moon was hanging low in a cloudy sky, a reminder that the universe was beautiful and mysterious and that another small step into that mystery was about to be taken.

LHC modelThe color provided by this sort of extravagant prose comes at a cost. It may make for a richer read, but to decorate the science with ornate wordplay has a way of obscuring the very ideas those words are supposed to highlight. Such language gives science a flavor of the mystic and inaccessible, which is exactly the opposite of what it is: messy, full of false starts and wrong ideas, but ultimately committed to making the universe more coherent.

No one ever said writing about particle physics was easy—the field of quantum mechanics shares a kind of proverbial inscrutability with rocket science, and nonscientists are understandably reluctant to dig in. But the best way to meet that challenge is to address it head-on, with clear analogies and straightforward language. The puzzles of the subatomic world—and specifically, the quest for the Higgs boson, a particle theorized to endow all others with mass—are interesting and entertaining in their own right; dressing them up in florid language only adds another layer of confusion between the author and the reader.

Good analogies—not extravagant metaphors—are essential for treatment of tough concepts. Fortunately, there are plenty of good models. The legendary physicist Richard Feynman, for example, was fond of comparing the process of exploring the atom to smashing two pocket watches together and then trying to figure out how they worked by examining the debris—an analogy that neatly captures how particle physics is a distinctly forensic exercise.