The certain event

Most of Physics is littered with events that can only be imputed a probability of happening. However, there is an event in contemporary Physics that is almost certain to happen – one of those rare things with a probability of 1.0. It is called the discovery of the Higgs boson particle at CERN – the large hadron collider. It has been shown that scientists have a bias toward proving the hypothesis, once it is stated. As the world waits, a trillion experiments are performed and an inexplicable amount of data is already collected. If the illusive particle is not hiding in the data already extracted, a trillion more collisions can be performed again, ever diminishing the probability of not finding it.

Humans have shown a weakness all through history – they seem to always find what they are looking for. When they stood up in the African savannah, they heard noises from the heaven. The village elder predicted the arrival of further noises, and the followers heard them. Later, religious leaders will predict the arrival of extraterrestrial entities and like clockwork they arrived. Much later, scientists, who shun such nonsense will state hypotheses and then find experimental noise to prove them. Although they hate to admit it, this is also in the grand tradition of the past. They smash things around to show themselves off. They write incomprehensible equations, create inexplicable hypotheses and set out to prove them in grand experiments. And, experiments always confirm the hypotheses.

Some say it is more exciting if they did not find what they set out to find. They will be disappointed – careers are already made and Nobel prizes are awaiting for those who are certain to confirm that the needle does exist in the abundant haystack of noise.