That Guy's a Dick!

As one of the very few media outlets in the world to ever have the opportunity to interview the Higgs Boson, we've got a unique perspective on the heretofore elusive particle's personality. We came away from our first encounter impressed with his physical abilities, but found his manners a bit wanting. Bit of a jerk, really.

Given his importance to our understanding of, well, everything in the physical world, we were willing to cut him a little slack. Lots of famous people come off as assholes, after all.

But after what the Boson did to one of our own this week, we've changed our tune. That dude's a dick. A mean, spiteful, dick.

William & Mary physicist Marc Sher "has devoted his entire professional life to theoretical description of the Higgs". When scientists at CERN recently announced new findings about the Boson's behavior, they comported neatly with Sher's theoretical models.

In other words, the Large Hadron Collider proved that Marc Sher's life's work was brilliant. (Though it did not find a way to prove that the William & Mary Tribe will ever make the NCAA Tournament. Some things are beyond science's reach.)

Not cool, LHC. Not cool at all. Marc Sher didn't want to be proven right. Dude wanted more mountains to climb, more challenges to tackle, more theories to, um, theorize. “I always said that the nightmare scenario would be if they found the Higgs and nothing else,” said Sher. “That’s what they found—the Higgs and nothing else.”

No anomalies. No odd ephemera to keep particle physicists arguing over pints. Neat, tidy, perfect. Sure, Sher's got dark matter, and the occasional neutrino to keep him busy. Even supersymmetry, maybe. Or time travel.

Small consolation, that. Would it really have been that hard for the Boson to bob and weave just a bit around the last turn? To bobble slightly in the LHC homestretch? Of course not. But like always, that asshole was just thinking about itself.

Jerk.