William Waldegrave wrote a column in Wednesday’s Times in which he reminisced about the day he issued a challenge to physicists to provide him with an explanation of the Higgs Boson which would fit on one side of a sheet of A4 paper.
One fact new to me was that he had promised a bottle of vintage champagne to the winner, & in the event found himself having to fork out for five bottles when the panel of eminent physicists, who judged the entries, decided that that number were equally outstanding.
Waldegrave regarded as ‘the most fun’ the explanation which used the analogy of the effect a certain female prime minister would have when she entered a crowded room, gaining mass as others gathered round her.
Not so very coincidentally, at about the same time as The Times was hitting the streets or the ether, Radio 5 Live’s Up All Night was talking to a physicist in America about the latest news from CERN. Asked if he could provide a simple explanation of the Higgs Boson the physicist said there was one – regretfully he was unable to say who had first come up with it – which clearly impressed presenter Giles Dilnot mightily.
It was of course the same as William Waldegrave’s ‘fun’ version, except that in the American adaptation the person capable of having such an effect is a female rock star.
Which reminded me in turn of a studio discussion I heard some years ago – also probably on 5 Live. The subject was Hugh Grant, then going through one of his less than happy periods.
Somebody stuck up for him: Whatever you think, he is one of those special people – when he’s in the room everybody else wants to be near him, they all move in his direction.
I wondered if, subconsciously at least, the speaker was thinking of particle physics as they said that?
