THE HIGGS BOSON

I'll be upfront about this; I don't give a monkey's for the Higgs Boson, of which there is now apparently proof.

It's not because I am completely ignorant of the science. I did relativity as the special subject in my maths degree at university; and I managed to read about half of A Brief History of Time before getting brain ache (if you don't have a maths degree, then you'll probably be floundering after chapter one or two, which is one of the reasons I have always wondered why it sold more than 10 million copies). True, I didn't continue after graduating; but I know roughly what they are going on about.

I have also visited CERN, the place just outside Geneva, where the experiments took place. As a lad, I played the bassoon in a youth orchestra, and we went on a trip to France. Our hosts arranged for us to visit CERN, which straddles the French-Swiss border. So we went down underground and looked at all of the equipment and the rather nerdy people who operated it.

But the facility I visited is not the one that exists today. In 1989 it was replaced with a 27km long tunnel ring, containing a large electron positron collider (in 2000 the LEP was replaced by the current large hadron collider in the same tunnel). By chance, my first job in the Treasury in 1985-86 was overseeing the science budget, when the decisions about the LEP tunnel were taken. So I knew quite a lot about its origins.

Why, then, am I so underwhelmed by this discovery? The basic reason is that particle physics research is essentially "toys for boys". I say boys deliberately, since most of the scientists are men. And their toys are enormous magnets that take ever smaller particles, fire them up to ever faster speeds, smash them into walls, and take snapshots of the results. To put it bluntly, apart from the academic qualifications of the protagonists, it is not that different from Mythbusters, an American TV programme that my son sometimes watches.

Normally I don't care if very intelligent men get a kick from looking at ever smaller bits of matter. The problem is that it is enormously expensive; and in a world of limited resources, I can't see that greater knowledge of the cosmic soup is more important than (say) finding a cure for cancer or developing the electric car or providing the world with clean water. Nor is this just my view. I can remember from my Treasury days that the biggest opponents of a large public contribution to the new LEP tunnel were not the hard-nosed accountants (the science budget had been fixed, we were discussing how to divide it up), but scientists in other fields, who rightly feared that particle physics was getting a disproportionate share of the cake, both money and brainpower. I think that that fear has been realised.

Peter Higgs deserves a Nobel prize for his work. But the discovery of what he predicted leaves me rather cold.

Walter Blotscher