Boson

We had a lot of weather this evening. Rain, predominantly - buckets of it, coming out of the skies. And, at times, through the roof of Sainsburys where I was doing my shopping. The roads were awash. My car was clean. Always look for positives.

They tell me the discovery of the Higgs boson has been confirmed today (they being people on the news who understand these things better than I). Fifty years or so after it was first postulated, there is now finally enough evidence collected at the Large Hadron Thing to be pretty confident it exists - 5 standard deviations' worth of confidence, which is rather more stringent than most experimental papers I read. This is probably one of the greatest scientific achievements in my lifetime. (I would have liked to have been around when Watson & Crick were doing their DNA model building, but it was not to be.)  It's always impressive when a theoretical prediction is eventually proved to be true. I can only dream of such success.

I have to admit I don't have a strong grasp of this new generation of subatomic particles - quarks and bosons and the like. Which is a shame given that I spend most of my working life thinking about things at an atomic level. It only serves to highlight that I probably don't actually have that good a grasp of the physical meaning even of atoms or molecules - what they really look like, how they behave and interact. All we have to work with is models - analogies and metaphors representing things beyond our understanding, but which serve to describe what is happening at whatever level of detail is necessary. Which is a bit scary in its own way; and only goes to highlight the futility of all knowledge.