An hypothesised gauge particle vamp
RARELY does news about physics make such a splash as has the probable discovery of that “goddam particle” often named after Peter Higgs (25 February). And rarely is the object of the news as abstract as the gauge particle for a hypothesised field. Journalistic attempts at a description for the layperson have, therefore, mined a rich seam of metaphors.
The picture of Higgs bosons as hangers-on flocking to the coolest person at a party (4 February) has made some outings, including of Peter Higgs himself at the CERN press conference.
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Roland Davis sends a variant appearing in free UK newspaper the Metro on 2 July: “Imagine the Higgs field is a room filled with particle zombies,” it says. “Our heroine, Miss T Quark, comes running into the room… All zombies love a sexy heroine, so they gather round her.”
But there are complications. “Now a wooden doll, Ms Electron, is shoved into the room… Zombies want brains not wood, so they pretty much ignore the dummy…”
“If only this was as enlightening as it is fun,” sighs Roland.
Having problems with the Flash video player on his computer showing only a green screen, Ian Chapple searched and found a video about how to fix it: this showed… you guessed?
WHAT is this “mass” that the Higgs field creates? The harder you look, the more difficult the question becomes. The : “Mass is, simply, a measure of how much stuff an object – a particle, a molecule, or a Yorkshire terrier – contains.” Did someone, we wonder, have a bet that they could work terriers into physics?
In this vein, The Daily Telegraph reports CERN’s Sergio Bertolucci commenting on unexpected discoveries:
Robin Adams’s mind “boggles at the thought of a meowing terrier whizzing about at the speed of light!”
MEANWHILE, a couple of readers offered this: “A Higgs boson walks into a church. The priest orders it to leave immediately. The boson protests: ‘But how can you have mass without me?'” We preserve this joke for posterity, since as far as we know no national libraries have on the shelves.
Dear Esteemed Reader and Friend in the Lord
HAVE you ever wondered why so many scam emails are so unconvincing? Why doesn’t the person with the €10 million that they need to discreetly launder through your bank account – if you’ll just first send them a few hundred in advance fees – try harder to read less like a scammer?
Feedback is grateful to Graham Ranson for alerting us to an answer that falls into the category “it seems obvious now it’s said, so it may be brilliant”. Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research has published a paper entitled “Why do Nigerian scammers say they are from Nigeria?” ().
Herley takes the scammer’s point of view, and realises that their task is equivalent to the problem known to radar operators as false positives. Fourteen pages of equations and graphs convincingly – to us – stand up the conclusion that “by sending an email that repels all but the most gullible, the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select”. They thus avoid the time costs involved in trying to gull the non-gullible.
Herley suggests that if the density of the gullible in the target population is low enough, “certain attacks pose no economic threat to anyone”. We’d like to believe him…
THE tub of Erythritol sweetener that John Blakey bought in Dronninglund, Denmark, tells him that the date of production is one year before the “best before” date stamped on the bottom of the tub. In this case, that date reads “13.09.2013”.
“My sweetener,” John observes, “was produced next September.”
ORGANIC food and drinks contain much goodness and naturalness. Science contains much of the quality “unnaturalness”. So, given these common understandings of the narrative of the world, the slogan on a Phoenix Organics drink delivery truck that Kris Ericksen sends from Wellington, New Zealand, makes sense: “Don’t drink science, you don’t know where it’s been.”
But, Feedback splutters philosophically, surely the point of the practice of science is that you do know exactly where it has been, with a full trail of citations back to the origin of what you hold in your hand?
Something gained in translation
FINALLY, staying in a Novotel establishment, Antony Badsey-Ellis was distracted from the entertainment on offer by a card advertising the online Novotel Store. In small print it bore the instruction: “To read this 2D code with your compatible mobile phone, launch the embedded player in your phone or download it free at then screw the 2D code with the objective of your device.”
Clearly, something has been gained in translation. But from what? The use of “objective” for “lens” is a clue: a quick attempt at reverse translation suggests German. Or Czech. Or Slovak. Or Polish. Feedback cannot work out which of these has a word similar to “capture” that could be mistranslated as “screw”.
Can readers help?