An Irishman's Diary

I’M BEGINNING to suspect that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), rather than being an attempt to find the elusive Higgs boson – the so-called “God particle” – and thereby explain the origins of the universe, is instead just a vast practical joke played on newspapers.

I say this because, last week, the Daily Telegraph(Web version) became the latest print-media outlet to succumb to an appallingly plausible typo, whereby the two middle letters in the word "Hadron" are transposed. The mistake was quickly rectified, but not before inspiring another outbreak of immature jokes among a certain class of reader.

The more austere the newspaper involved, the more mirthful the reaction. When the New York Timesfell victim to the large hadron transposition a while back, there was much tittering at the expense of that great organ (yes, exactly).

Difficult physics concepts such as “Higgs excitation” were given new twists. Someone coined the term the “Oh God! particle”. And almost inevitably, there arose at least one website (www.largehardoncollider.com) dedicated to exploring the parameters of what it claims is the “world’s funniest scientific malapropism”.

I am assured by the Institute of Physics in Ireland (IOP), however, that embarrassing journalists was never among the motives behind the construction of the 27km tunnel under Geneva.

Furthermore, IOP spokeswoman Alison Hackett tells me that physicists are themselves haunted by the risk of misspellings. With a slip of the keyboard, her organisation can appear in print as the Institute of “Psychics”, which as you may imagine, attracts the wrong sort of crowd to IOP events.

Consequently, despite the risks, I have agreed to mention that the institute’s annual “spring meeting” begins today in Athlone. And that (Warning to sub-editors: Hazardous Material – Handle with Care!) the Large Hadron Collider will feature prominently during the weekend’s activities.

In fact, with impeccable timing, the LHC underlined its credentials last week by setting a new world record for the acceleration of protons. Two circular proton beams, each with an energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts, were shot around the tunnel at 99.999999 per cent of the speed of light. Which dizzying achievement, as it happens, has strong Irish involvement.

Not in terms of investment, sadly. The Irish flag does not fly over Cern headquarters. And with so much money now being invested in exploring the black hole that used to the Irish banking system, cosmic physics may be even less a priority than before (another subject on the weekend’s agenda).

What’s more, so far as I know, the LHC is the only major tunnelling project in Europe that was not dug by Donegal men.

But it turns out that the person in charge of Cern’s accelerators – the man with his foot on the giant Toyota pedal, as it were – is from Belfast. Steve Myers has been dubbed “Lord of the Rings” for his work with the proton beams. And he will be star speaker in Athlone, explaining among other things how the huge energies in the LHC are created using a technique pioneered by Ireland’s only Nobel-winning physicist, Ernest Walton.

THE THEME of the IOP meeting, incidentally, is “The Definite Particle”: a literary pun chosen after some soul-searching. “The Indefinite Particle” might be more accurate: since the Higgs boson is something that, so far, is only presumed to exist.

But as Alison says, it was thought better to accentuate the positive.

Many scientists dislike the term “God particle”: some because they fear it offends religious people, others because they fear it encourages them. So an alternative literary-pun title – “Waiting for God” – was quickly rejected. And this was doubly wise because if any Irish writer is intimately involved with the subject of particle physics, his name is not Samuel Beckett.

In fact, it’s a happy coincidence that Finnegans Wake should also be in the news at the moment, because Joyce’s last masterpiece was to some extent his response to new thinking about the universe, post-Einstein.

It gave the word “quark” to physics (quarks being what hadrons are composed of). And it was Joyce’s attempt to emulate physicists’ experiments, in his case by breaking words into their smallest components, and then reforming them in creative ways.

The possibilities of “Hadron” would not have been lost on him.

Some traumatised sub-editors blame Joyce for destabilising English in the 1920s and 1930s, setting free large numbers of commas and apostrophes, which then took on a life of their own and have been turning up ever since in places where they're not wanted, from the possessive form of "its" to the title of Finnegans Wake.

But that aside, I’m struck by certain similarities between the aforementioned novel and the Hadron Collider. Both are large, circular structures (Finnegans Wake begins in the middle of a sentence and loops around, several hundred pages later, to meet the same spot). Both are located in a kind-of underworld. And, so far as I know, no Donegal men were involved in the book’s construction either.

Of course these are superficial analogies. There is no real comparison between these two vast experiments, other than that the success of each is still questioned. Indeed, if the Higgs boson is found and the universe finally explained, I predict Joyceans will still be arguing about the meaning of Finnegans Wakefor centuries afterwards. But then, famously, the book's last word is a definite article. Which is a joke in itself, because "the" can never be the last word on anything.

More details about the Institute of Physics in Ireland’s spring meeting are at www.iopireland.org 

• fmcnally@irishtimes.com