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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

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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.

Or take the description of the Higgs boson itself. While many of the articles about the LHC dutifully mentioned the Higgs, there wasn't much attempt to explain the peculiar way it is supposed to work, endowing some particles with much more mass than others. In his book The Fabric of the Cosmos, physicist Brian Greene takes a shot at it, working off the concept of a "Higgs ocean"—a field of Higgs particles that covers the whole universe:

If we liken a particle's mass to a person's fame, then the Higgs ocean is like the paparazzi: those who are unknown pass through the swarming photographers with ease, but famous politicians and movie stars have to push much harder to their destination.

Greene succinctly captures two essential concepts: First, that mass represents the "drag" of a particle through a crowded field of Higgs bosons. Second, some particles are more susceptible to this drag than others; hence, the proton and neutron are more "famous" or heavy than, say, the electron. For another shot at this curiosity, British physicist John Ellis compared the Higgs ocean to a snow field; some particles are wearing boots and must trudge heavily through the snow while others are endowed with snowshoes or even skis that allow them to glide effortlessly over the snow.

The particle-as-famous-person analogy has been around for a while in various incarnations. A bastardization of it shows up in a Times article from July 2007 by Dennis Overbye, who likens the Higgs process to "the way a V.I.P. acquires an entourage pushing through a cocktail party." In addition to omitting the fact that the process works differently for different particles, Overbye fails to understand what anyone who's seen an episode of Entourage knows: that the VIP arrives to the party with his crew intact—precisely the old model of mass that the Higgs explanation replaces.

Journalists might fairly counter that they lack the space for nuts-and-bolts quantum mechanics, which is better left to books. (And the books certainly cover it. In a review of Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole War for the Times, George Johnson complained that before he got to the meat of the book's argument, he "had to get through a 66-page crash course on relativity and quantum mechanics. Every book about contemporary physics seems to begin this way, which can be frustrating to anyone who reads more than one.") Fair enough. At the very least, then, the mainstream press might aim for a more modest goal: to convey a sense of the larger themes at work in a given set of experiments. In this case, scientists are exploring important ideas about symmetry and simplicity in the laws of the universe.

On the whole, the best writing about physics for a general audience seems to come from physicists, not journalists. This isn't due to the fact that physicists understand the subject matter better—if anything, people who spend all day in the lab are often the worst at explaining the big picture. Rather, they're better at writing about physics because they don't try so hard to make you care. They don't believe their readers must be seduced with colorful wordplay or end-of-the-world melodramas. Journalists writing popular treatments of subatomic physics could take a lesson from the scientists: Tell it straight and have a little faith that the subject matter itself—a major advance in our understanding of the cosmos—can generate its own wonder and excitement.