Spin zero

This week saw the increasingly familiar sight of hordes of journalists descending on CERN to hear the latest news from the LHC. There were 66 of them to be precise, many of whom announced to us they planned to come for the seminar long before they were invited. It’s a sign of the times that science that used to be conducted in private is now carried out in the public domain. That has the potential to be very good news for science, and for society as a whole, particularly when CERN’s scientists do such a great job of conveying the passion and excitement of their research.

A typical Higgs candidate event in the CMS detector.

We live in a science-dominated age, where everyone has to make science-based decisions on a daily basis. Yet at the same time, apathy towards science has been growing while pseudo-science gains ground. For that reason, it’s incumbent upon scientists to push science further up the popular agenda. The fact that the LHC has got the ‘x-factor’, as one Tuesday newspaper story put it, gives us a great opportunity to achieve that goal.

The media coverage from the Higgs update seminar was vast and largely accurate, speaking of the scientific process and hints of Higgs that need more data to confirm or refute. Coverage was about how science is done, and people seem to love it. One piece of feedback the press office received congratulated CERN on ‘massively raising public understanding of how science works’.

Discussion in the social media was lively and informed – though there were detailed side discussions about the speakers’ choices of font for their presentations, and frustration from some that the level was too high. Someone even suggested that we should run a parallel webcast giving a simultaneous interpretation for the general public. Although that didn’t happen on Tuesday, many scientists chipped into the debate on twitter and in blogs. One live blog from the main auditorium attracted a following of more than 30,000 people, while despite a few technical glitches, CERN’s webcast was tuned into from over 110,000 individual IP addresses. And CERN’s following on twitter broke the 400,000 barrier.

At the end of the day, one journalist jokingly speculated on twitter that spin doctoring might have been the reason that everyone he spoke to told the same story. The reality, of course, is simply that we have great stories to tell. And as we all know, the Higgs needs zero spin.

Physics Nobel Laureate Jerome Friedman answers the question "Higgs or no Higgs?":

by James Gillies