The Seen and the Unseen

Most religions with nature gods give pride of place to the sun and moon. For the most part both follow a very regular schedule in their behavior, but there is one prominent exception - eclipses. The key to explaining eclipses was the discovery by the ancients of the lunar nodes - the points where the line of intersection of the planes of the ecliptic (the Sun's apparent path through the sky) and the orbital plane of the moon intercept the sky. Eclipses only occur when Sun, Moon, and node are all aligned.

These ancient astronomers didn't know that the Earth went around the Sun, or even that it was round, but they had discovered that there were these mysterious antipodal spots that moved around the sky and had power over Moon and Sun. Unlike Sun and Moon, though, they couldn't be seen. Some think that these unseen powers were the origin of the idea of an unseen god, which seemed to have power over even the mightiest of the other gods.

The unseen, or at any rate, the not yet seen, was a common theme of twentieth century physics. Much of the thrill of particle physics arose from the remarkable predictions, subsequently confirmed, of new kinds of particle - the neutrino, the positron, the pi meson, the omega, and the quark - the last still unseen (directly) and very likely to remain that way. The culmination of the century of particles was the standard model, now about forty years old, and the discovery of all its predicted particles shortly after.

Except one. That last one has proven elusive, but it is also essential, because it is that "Higgs" particle that plays the main role in giving the other particles mass.

This week, most of the usual suspects ( NEW, TRF, CV) have posted on the latest Higgs news. The news is that there isn't much news - the Higgs hasn't been found, but a bunch of new places (in the energy spectrum) have been searched with negative results. There are good theoretical reasons to believe that there aren't many more good places to look.

If the Higgs isn't found, that is probably bigger news than finding it. It's absence can't kill the standard model - that model works too, too well for that - but it will show that it is incomplete in some very fundamental way.