In this game, you have to be more than just ahead

At around half one on the twelfth of December, I passed somebody in a doorway who gave me the news that there would be a broadcast from CERN the following day, and that there had been “findings”. I emailed my editor almost immediately, requesting to report on those findings, whatever they were.

I got no response.

At just before one on the thirteenth, I sat in the centre of the front row in a seminar room to watch the broadcast. I had my notebook in my arms and my Dictaphone on my lap. I was ready. Nobody was going to take this away from me. I had been ahead of the game.

Physicists: lecturers, researchers and students alike crammed into the tiny room at the University of Liverpool. The screen at the front of the room displays row after row of excited academic faces just like ours. The older members of the audience whisper the names of those they recognise; they are jealous of their position.

The aroma of sandwiches and crisps filled the room. Let it be known that, even when the world stands on the brink of the greatest scientific discovery in decades, lunchtime must be strictly observed.

When the broadcast started, there were early technical difficulties. As it progressed, they became on-going technical difficulties, and by the end of the broadcast, were late technical difficulties.

I ended up moving to another screen, standing in a warm corridor with plenty of other people who had no idea what was going on, holding my Dictaphone above the others’ heads.

I must admit, I knew at the time that what I was doing was futile, that I was resigned to the fact that my editor had ignored my email and that the story would be passed on to the first of my illiterate cowriters to fumble a desperate message on their iPhone.

The eventual response from my editor, when I asked if someone had got in before me was “hiya yer”- Which added quite a bit of insult to my already considerable injury.

Do you know what, though? Sod them. I’m reporting on what CERN found, right here, right now.

Two experiments possibly found something, in roughly the same place, but not quite. It’s all a bit vague. They do, however, agree on the fact that we are a long way off confirming anything and the Higgs Boson will not be announced as a discovery until after more experiments in the following year. I wasn’t disappointed by this, but many of my (mentally) younger colleagues were.

The ATLAS experiment, represented by Fabiola Gianotti, concluded that the Higgs mass is somewhere around 125 GeV. All good scientists should know, however, that a discovery is not a discovery until it has been found to be accurate to something called five-sigma. The Higgs was “found” by ATLAS at 126 GeV at 3.6 sigma. This, incidentally, is a long way off five, and in theory, the readings that scientists are hoping is the Higgs… well, it could just be statistical anomalies.

These are fun in their way, but a massive waste of time and money. As Ms Gianatti put it, “I think it would be really kind for the Higgs Boson to be here.”

After ATLAS concluded their piece, the majority of people left. Only the most advanced particle physicists, many as they were, understood even half of what was going on, and being so advanced, they mostly had better places to be.

I must confess that I too left the corridor and returned to the problem class I was supposed to be in an hour earlier.

I am proud of being there though. I have, on my Dictaphone, a recording of a physicist making a joke. I suffered to get that; I had to trawl through a great deal of tape that was too noisy, or too scientific to use- just for that one sound bite. My arms ached from holding the thing aloft for the best part of an hour.

I was there, though. I stood on the edge of history, all for the distant and evanescent hope that I might one day write it.

Oh, and Merry Christmas. May your dreams be as deep and crisp and even as you want them to be, and may I have the sense to write a festive blog entry next year.

Universally Challenged

I know. I’ve been away. It’s because I’m struggling to express one particular concept. To corrupt a cliché, I have managed to snatch failure from the jaws of success.

Anyone who knows me, or has read this blog before will be mightily aware that I have a certain infatuation with the idea of appearing on University Challenge. The sad fact is, I may be about to miss that train.

I’m the reserve. I’m the cursewording reserve.

Out of the fifty or so who took the test, most were abysmal-let’s face it, most people are at most things. It’s a fact we live with, move on from but still have to put up with at times. There were just six candidates that stood out well above the rest. The team were in that six. I was in that six. One unlucky fellow was also in that six.

I guess I should count my blessings that I’m not him, her, it, zir or em. Another day, different questions, and I might have been. Say, if George hadn’t told me that Niels Bohr had said a particular something, or if I hadn’t looked up the dates of Immanuel Kant that morning. These two facts have now slipped my mind, but they came to my aid when I needed them.

That person is wandering around right now, stunned by the fact that they aren’t as much of a genius as they thought they were. Do they know how close they came?

I hope not. It’s rubbish knowing that you were a whisker from success. It’s rubbish being the reserve. I’m not going to poison the others, break their limbs or anything like that. I can’t pretend I wish them all well though.

They’re my Facebook friends. We went out for drinks last week. I had to sit in the pub with them, knowing that if anything on Greek Mythology comes up I’m going to be eating my own shoes in the audience, despairing that they don’t know any of it- but I do. I had to sit in the pub with them, knowing that I’m not really one of them, and that if I really want to get onto University Challenge, one of them is going to miss out.

If that happens, will they hate me? I want it to happen. I want one, non-specific member of the team to go down with crushing gastroenteritis an hour before we go to film the first round. I want him to gladly give his place to me. It might be bad for team spirit, but I’d love to save the day, I really would.

So perhaps it’s my calling to be the reserve. My brilliance has been confirmed, so my ego isn’t suffering. I probably won’t get onto the program, but there is still a chance. There is a chance of me being the happiest person alive for just a little bit, as a door that was creaking shut suddenly opens for me.

I want it to happen. I know it won’t. Wish me luck.