Why Margaret Thatcher is like a Higgs Boson

[DreamGypsy]

I understand that the former Prime Minister may not been the most popular figure on DU. Her polices and affiliations were....well, those have been thoroughly discussed (and disgust) elsewhere, so there's no need to take them up again here.

However, I found this recollection Margaret Thatcher, politician, scientist on the Quantum Diaries. The article puts Thatcher in, at least with respect to science, a bit of a positive and personnel light. The discussion is entertaining as well, at least more entertaining than playing Ding Dong the Witch is Dead on a continuous loop.

During her undergraduate years, Thatcher was a chemist at the University of Oxford. It was only later that she studied law and became a politician, so from her very early career she had an appreciation for science. She knew about the care and attention needed to make discoveries, the frustration of waiting for data, and the need for peer review and skepticism. Given her status as an international leader, she had the opportunity to visit CERN in the early 1980s, but as a scientist she took so much more away from the visit than we could have expected.

She’d asked to be treated like a fellow scientist, and her questions showed that she had taken her background reading about CERN seriously. She asked why the proposed accelerator, LEP, would be circular and not linear. This is not an easy question to answer unless the person asking has knowledge about how accelerators work. After a discussion with Herwig Schopper, then Director General, she came back to the UK as an ambassador for CERN and LEP was approved in the UK shortly afterwards. One of her questions was very astute. When told that the LEP tunnel would be the last at CERN she knew from experience that scientists will usually want to go further with their research and in particle physics at the energy frontier, further usually means larger. It’s true that CERN has reused the LEP tunnels for the LHC, but there are also proposals for even larger projects that will probe even higher center of mass energies.

Thatcher must have made a very good impression on Schopper during her visit. A recent Scientific American article has revealed that she was told about the discovery of the W and Z bosons before the information was made public. This letter shows that Schopper kept his promise and trusted Thatcher to keep the tantalizing and preliminary evidence to herself. (see letter at the link above).

<snip>

In 1993, three years after Thatcher left office, David Miller from UCL came up with an analogy for the Higgs field where Thatcher played the central role. Essentially we can think of the Higgs field like a room full of people milling around at a cocktail party. Someone famous and popular enters the room, and all of a sudden people crowd around, making this person’s journey through the room harder. They take longer to get up to a good walking speed, and when they are walking they become harder to stop. That’s essentially what mass is - a measure of hard it is to change an object’s velocity. The analogy goes further, to include rumors being spread from the vicinity of this famous person. They would spread in small groups of people, and each group would have its own “mass”, which is what the Higgs boson is, it’s just an excitation of the field in the presence of matter. Who was the famous person in this analogy? Margaret Thatcher, of course!

Thatcher and the Higgs field

So, from now on, if you feel angry or annoyed by Thatcher or some other politician and her or his policies...just picture them as a particle that has a strong interaction with the Higgs field.

The really important point made by the article is in the last paragraph:

If we’re to keep pursuing scientific discoveries in the future, we need scientifically literate and inspired politicians. It would be tempting to say that they are becoming more and more rare, but in reality I think things are more favorable than they have been before. With the recent discoveries we’re in a golden age of physics that has made front page news. Multimedia outlets and the internet have helped spread the good word, so science is high in the public consciousness, and justifying further research is becoming easier. However before the modern internet era and the journalistic juggernaut that comes to CERN each time there’s a big announcement it fell on the shoulders of a few people, and Thatcher was one of them.

[Orsino]

1. Interacting with either was incredibly expensive? n/t

[Warpy]

2. She certainly caused the accretion of money

away from labor and around the people who already had more than they could ever spend in ten lifetimes.

Still, it's nice to know she knew enough not to want to stop pure research, unlike that lazy doofus Reagan.

Pity she hadn't stuck to science. The world might be a much better place instead of a worse one.