WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DR ADAM DAVISON?

Currently featured in the 20th revised edition of Malleus Maleficus' [title withheld], the following has been taken more or less verbatim from the BBC Horizon transmission: "The Hunt for the Higgs", of January 9th, 2012.  If you wish to report intrusiveness, defamation or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com  To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .

  When eventually we caught up with Butterworth and Dr. Adam Davison in the canteen, they were sipping coffee from paper beakers and covering  their napkins with complicated equations.  Davison talked conspiratorially of the new lower limit having risen to 115 GeV and the new upper limit having dropped to 127 GeV.  “.... So the Higgs Boson might exist and it might have a mass of around 125 GeV,”  he said, staring into the distance with a look of personal entitlement. I said nothing because I was overcome with a feeling that my presence was inadequate and unequal. Belinda had no such feelings. She sat next to Butterworth, whom she’d never met before, and found him a total delight. In fact, she’d come back just for the experience, she subsequently said, never once having taken her  eyes off his face.

          “Six  months ago… erm....; but now… erm...” said Butterworth. 

          Was the LHC being launched live to the strains of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, Belinda prompted encouragingly. 

           Davison was sporting  the beam of someone for whom the meaning of life had just become clear. “I mean there will be a day sometime next year where we will go in not knowing whether the HB exists or not, and we will come out and that will be a fact: we will know one way or another...”

          “The first is undeniable and the second obvious.” Belinda said, rather too quickly.

          Butterworth looked at Belinda for a minute without saying anything, then took a deep breath: “It may not be everyone’s idea of a great time, but what we are seeing is physics’ textbooks being written…erm, and to me, I’ve been studying physics for so

long and to know what is in those textbooks and to see new pages being written that will never be unwritten, this is something new we know that we didn’t know before that we will always know afterwards that is really exciting.”

          “I don’t follow,” I said.

          “Exactly,” he replied.

           Davison nodded absently. “If every theory was like a room, you know, we looked in the first one down the corridor, and already we found something really exciting – loads of things we’d like to look for like supersymmetry, extra dimensions, new fundamental forces, substructures like quarks....” he trails off.

          On and on they went…roughly, as follows:

          Butterworth: “I’m really oscillating between thinking it is clearly there and then, naaa… is not going to turn up, is it?”

          Davison: “Yeah, I don’t know, yeah I, I think I’ve decided not to have a strong opinion… I tend to wait… I mean almost everywhere it would be more exciting to prove if it doesn’t exist.”

          Butterworth: “Yeah, it would be a longer term bigger result I think…the negative result would have a larger term, bigger impact probably – it would really put us back to the drawing board - on the other hand in the short term it would be kind of disappointing..”

.”

          Davison: “I don’t know, erm… a negative result would even in the short term be much more exciting…”

       Butterworth: “Maybe…”

          Davison: “…it’s the opposite of what people expect, right?”

          Butterworth: “…right!”

          Davison: “It’s like, it would be a lot more fun….”

          “I don’t mean to interrupt,” Belinda said soothingly, like a nurse taking care of her patients,  “but  are you two competing - or working together?”

The Enlightened Ones....

          “Together” said Butterworth. “If he finds out more I’ll take the credit.”

          It is difficult to describe the rapport between this pair without lapsing into pulp-fiction. They were a supremely amenable double act. Belinda claimed they had developed a “good cop, bad cop” routine that suited the CERN community’s interests rather well.  Both possessed the same passion for knowledge, the same mathematical intelligence, the same frigidity of analysis, the same devotional surrender to the beauty of physics. For whatever their humorous demeanour, both were single-mindedly, mercilessly serious about science and knowledge. And if at least one of the two acquired Belinda’s affection by tweeting the following beguiling, message: “Physics is being rewritten. The only thing that’scertain is the future,” it is probably true to say that astuteness was a quality neither Butterworth nor Davison ever denied having and the clock was always ticking...  

Introducing Belinda Blew-James....