Part of the process (Image: CERN)
In the age of Twitter and blogs, it’s impossible to stop leaks about possible major discoveries, says James Gillies
A recent reported that the Higgs boson had been found, based on information leaked from one of the experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Are leaks really such a bad thing?
What happened is that an early stage of an analysis was leaked. If something is leaked and then turns out to be untrue, it gives the impression that we don’t really know what we are doing, whereas this is just part of the normal analysis process.
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What should have happened before this information was made public?
In particle physics you have small working groups that do an analysis that they then put out to a larger part of the collaboration for scrutiny. Very often it won’t get beyond that. If it does, then the analysis goes out to the whole collaboration for scrutiny. That can be the end of the story, but if it passes that test it goes to the wider community for discussion – but again, it may not survive the external clearing process.
With huge collaborations of physicists, it must be impossible to stop leaks.
I personally think it’s inevitable that information will come out. It’s part of the nature of the field. We are very open in particle physics. There are 3000 people in these collaborations and in excess of 100 institutions.
Will the leaks lead to a witch-hunt at CERN?
I wouldn’t go as far as that, but people will want to know what has happened and ensure that it won’t happen again.
What is supposed to happen if someone really does find the Higgs at the LHC?
We have devised a protocol for dealing with a blockbuster result. If one of the collaborations has a result to announce, they inform the director general of CERN. This sets in motion a chain of events. Other experiments with potentially the same physics are given the chance to confirm the findings. If the result is big enough, like discovery of a supersymmetric particle or the Higgs boson, we inform the heads of other laboratories and all our member states that this is coming, and organise an announcement seminar at CERN.
If the Higgs is found at the LHC, who will get credit for discovering it?
That’s a difficult question. You can’t point to a small number of individuals in the way that you could in the past. Take the last Nobel prize CERN won for experimental particle physics. Everyone would agree that the two recipients, and , merited it. Even though hundreds of people were involved in that project, those two people really made it happen. There isn’t a similar situation today.
Has any good come from the leaks?
Since the recent leak about the Higgs I have had lots of conversations with journalists who want to understand the process of discovery in particle physics. That’s an extremely good thing. The fact that the level of interest is so high is a positive for us and something that we should embrace.
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James Gillies is head of communication at , the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. He holds a PhD in physics from the University of Oxford
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
