An Irishman's Diary

I WAS struck yesterday by the poetic-sounding surname of that scientist who made the first announcement of a breakthrough on the Higgs boson. “Incandela” he was called, a name of Italian provenance, but surely descended from the same Latin original that gave us “candle” and “incandescent”.

Who better to announce the discovery of the so-called “God particle”, I thought? It was a little disappointing, therefore, when his language fell well short of the Book of Genesis. Instead of “Let there be light”, or a variation on that theme, news reports quoted him as just pointing to a spike in data assembled from trillions of proton collisions and commenting soberly: “We have an excess that is pretty substantial at 125 GeV. You can see that there is something quite interesting here.” In terms of drama, that was less in keeping with the surname “Incandela” than with his first name, “Joe”. And yet his news was exciting enough, apparently, that the room “erupted in applause”.

Of course there’s always tension between the restraint with which scientific breakthroughs should properly be presented and the demands of public relations.

And regarding the “excess at 125 GeV”, for example, the other end of the language spectrum is “God particle”, a term many physicists dislike intensely but that journalists love (while pretending to distance themselves from it by using quotation marks and the prefix “so-called”, both of which I sneaked into my opening paragraph).

Our excuse is that it serves a legitimate purpose, by capturing the imagination of a general audience that might otherwise struggle to be interested in the excess at 125 GeV, however substantial. And since research projects depend on public funding, some exaggeration in the terminology, even by researchers, may occasionally be excused.

If anything, physicists erred too far on the side of sobriety when, 40 years ago, they first described the combined interaction of subatomic particles in which the Higgs boson was presumed to be a crucial part. This was one of the great scientific advances of the 20th century, and brought us closer to understanding the universe.

But if you held a competition to find the most boring name imaginable for the equation, it would hard to improve on the one they chose, “the Standard Model”. Rather than explaining the universe, it sounds like something you might use to calculate the consumer price index.

Contrast that with the names of some of the model’s components, especially “quark”, for which its discoverer went outside the English language altogether, to Finnegans Wake. And even the word “boson” has entertainment potential.

It comes, prosaically enough, from the surname of an Indian scientist, Satyendra Bose. But as we’ve noted here before, it has an added resonance in that many spell checkers and automatic-text facilities still wrongly correct it. As recently as yesterday, my phone tried to change “Higgs boson” to “high bosom” and I’d almost sent the resultant message to my editor (suggesting an appropriate diary picture – imagine!) before I noticed.

I DON'T KNOWwhether sexing up the coverage from Cern would help the Irish researchers whose participation in the project is threatened by cutbacks.

Unfortunately the branch of science that has most influence on government these days is the dismal one, and the idea of “monetising” everything, from culture to septic tanks, is currently supreme. Whereas Irish involvement in Cern struggles to justify itself in purely commercial terms.

Even so, perhaps the ghost of Éamon de Valera could be invoked in the cause. As readers will know, de Valera was an accomplished mathematician, or certainly liked to pose as one. And when he became Taoiseach back in the grim 1930s, he refused to let mere poverty stand between Ireland and a role at the leading edge of international science.

So he set up the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. And as a suitably prestigious director, he head-hunted Erwin Schrödinger, who, as an Austrian Jew, would soon be in need of a country as well as a job. With Dev’s backing, money was no obstacle to the institute. Thus, sure enough, Schrödinger came to Ireland.

Others followed him, like moths to a flame. He even tried to tempt his friend Paul Dirac, the 1933 Nobel Prize winner (and the man who coined the term “boson“), through Dirac’s wife, by mentioning in a letter to her the freely available “ham, butter, eggs” that, as war-time rationing descended on the rest of Europe, were one of the perks of an Irish job.

The institute’s prestige was only added to by the fact that, in breaks between running the country, de Valera dropped occasionally to attend lectures.

This was the same era during which he outlined his famous vision of a country “bright with cozy homesteads”, etc. So in keeping with his characterisation as a man who could pick up mercury with a fork, Dev manage simultaneously to advance the idea of a pastoral, spiritual Ireland, and an Ireland that was also pushing back the frontiers of science.

The main point, though, is that the country was broke then, too. And this didn’t stop it playing a part on the international stage. On the contrary, the lights were going out all over Europe, again.

Meanwhile, out on its western edge, Ireland continued to glow softly, thanks to the combined effects of all those candle-lit homesteads and the incandescent physicists in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.