Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Is it just me ...

... or do many of the paragraphs in this New York Times article about the mysterious Higgs boson, or, more colloquially, "God particle," sound like the dissection of some internecine gangsta rap conflict?

To wit:
The team, known as the D Zero collaboration and numbering some 600 physicists from 19 countries and 88 institutions, will not even say whether there is a bump in its data until the scientists have decided for sure that it is nature calling and not just a random statistical fluctuation.
And:
D Zero is the younger of two rival detectors at the accelerator. The other, known as the Collider Detector Facility, or C.D.F., was built and staffed by an equally large group that is scouring its own data for the Higgs and other new phenomena.
More:
The race is further complicated on the American side by the rivalry between the C.D.F. and D Zero groups. Earlier this summer, Fermilab had to schedule a pair of back-to-back seminars so each group could announce its own discovery of a new particle, a combination of quarks called the cascade-b.
Oh, snap!
Dr. Konigsberg, of the rival team, said they had their own analysis of their own b-quark measurements underway. He compared the rumor to a game of telephone that “starts one way, ends up the other.”
Them physicists are straight gangsta macks, 187 on the Higgs boson, son.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's like the Wu-tang Clan in a parallel universe, where, instead of being immersed in kung-fu lore, they are physicists.

Jake Freedom said...

H - your blog wins.

For now...