As a physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, one of the most frequent questions I am asked is “When are you going to find something?”. Resisting the temptation to sarcastically reply “Besides the Higgs boson, which won the Nobel Prize, and a whole slew of new composite particles?”, I realise that the reason the question is posed so often is down to how we have portrayed progress in particle physics to the wider world.
We often talk about progress in terms of discovering new particles, and it often is. Studying a new, very heavy particle helps us view underlying physical processes – often without annoying background noise. That makes it easy to explain the value of the discovery to the public and politicians.
