PHYSICS WORLD
For any soothsayer seeking to predict what will happen over the coming year, it is natural to begin by looking back over the previous 12 months – and equally tempting to give the year just gone more importance than it truly deserves. Yet surely historians will look back on 2011 as some kind of turning point, given the unprecedented popular uprisings across the Middle East that have led to new regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. Many of these protests were helped by the use of social-networking tools that appeared to allow protestors to join forces and co-ordinate their actions. These communication tools were also the theme of the “Occupy” movement against economic and social inequality, which took hold in more than 80 countries as the world’s economies faltered and share prices plunged amid a sovereign debt crisis across Europe.
Whether the use of social-media tools really were the driving force behind these events – some such as Malcolm Gladwell think otherwise – certainly the ability to communicate so easily and instantly is reshaping the world, and physics is no exception. Back in 1983 when physicists at CERN discovered the W and Z bosons, most of the discussion and debate between the two rival experiments at the Super Proton Synchrotron took place sedately behind closed doors, with the final results presented neatly in press conferences in the January of that year. Fast forward to today and as 2011 draws to a close, CERN’s scientists working with its current machine – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – no longer had that luxury as evidence began to emerge last week for the elusive Higgs boson.
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