"Discover" Disses AM Radio

[Laurence Glavin]

I was perusing a few articles in the current issue of "Discover"
magazine, a publication dealing with issues in the world of science.
An article beginning on page 44 of the July issue, entitled "Catch Me
If You Can", deals with the search for an elusive particle, or even
multitude of particles, called the Higgs boson.    Physicists 
propel subatomic particles at more than 99.99% of the speed of
light to see what escapes when they collide.  The Higgs boson is supposed
to answer the question: 'why does matter weigh something instead of
nothing"?  Sometime in the future, a super-duper collider may tease
it out of matter, but for now, researchers using a collider near
Chicago are on the case.  The device, called a Tevatron "is not 
sensitive enough given the current data to distinguish the fallout
of a Higgs shower from those of other heavy heavy particles such as 
the top quark..". "You probably have to produce about a billion 
Higgs particles to reliably identify one, MIT theorist Frank Wilczech
warned...even the Large Hadron Collider  will struggle with this
problem...it's like listening to AM radio;  there's so much interference,"
OK, here's a scientists from Cambridge, working in suburban 
Chicago, using AM radio as an analogy.   I wonder if this comparison
came from his experience tryng to listen to AM radio in the
Boston area or in Chcago.  The latter has three 1A clear channel
stations while Boston has only one.  Maybe he got the idea from 
trying to listen to WJIB more than 5 miles away from Fresh Pond!


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