Leading article: It's the search that counts, not the discovery
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark was once called "the impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature". That's a good description of the search for the Higgs boson, now in its fifth decade. The object of the quest, an infinitesimal particle, may not even exist, but the hunt goes on.
Planted in us, too deep for memory, are the instincts of the hunter-gatherers we once were. We find it easy to combine with others in common enterprise, co-ordinating individual efforts in the pursuit of our prey. Thus yesterday hundreds of physicists crowded into a room at Cern, the particle physics laboratory, in Switzerland. So many others tried to follow through the online feed that it crashed.
Did the evidence laid before them prove the particle's existence? No, but the game's still afoot and a great pack of humanity, including some of our finest minds, still presses on its trail.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments