Finalist: The New York Times, by Dennis Overbye

Dear Pulitzer Jurors,

 

My name is Dennis Overbye. I’m writing to introduce myself as a reporter for the New York Times and to nominate my story, “Chasing the Higgs,” for the prize in explanatory reporting. The story is a multimedia package of words, graphics and video that explains how scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, discovered a new elementary particle known as the Higgs boson, aka “the God particle,” in 2012, and what that discovery meant.

 

“Chasing the Higgs” took up the entire Science Times section on March 4, 2013. Its main elements include an 6,700-word narrative from the point of view of scientists in the trenches at CERN; a pair of interactive graphics explaining what the Higgs boson is and how it was found, produced by Nigel Holmes, Jonathan Corum and Gonzalez Xaquin, video interviews of CERN scientists, produced by

Jeffrey Delviscio, Catherine Spangler and Soo-Jeong Kang and a pair of shorter articles exploring the meaning of the new particle both for the universe and for the future of American science, both written by me.

 

The discovery of the Higgs was a big deal in science. Scientists get to discover a new constituent of nature, a new fundamental particle, only once in a generation, if they are lucky. That’s what happened on July 4, 2012, when a team of physicists in Geneva announced that they had discovered the Higgs boson, “boson” just being jargon for the kind of  particle that can convey forces. In the story that astronomers and physicists had been telling themselves (and us) for the last half century, ever since Peter Higgs and others first predicted the existence of this particle, the Higgs boson explains why there is mass and diversity in the universe, why everything doesn’t fly apart at the speed of light, why atoms and life can be possible.

 

At stake in the search to fulfill that prediction was no less than a grand explanation of the history of a universe that was born simple and sterile and gets more complex and interesting as it goes along. The world’s physicists had spent their intellectual and political capital on building an ever larger and more expensive particle accelerators, culminating in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the biggest science machine ever built, which started working finally in 2010.

 

The discovery of the discovery of the Higgs two years later led newspapers around the world. Science magazine called it the “Breakthrough of the Year.” It was such a mark of cultural universality that the singer will.i.am, of The Black Eyed Peas had tweeted “[H]appy ‘god particle’ day,” to his 4 million followers on the morning of the announcement. Only slightly more than a year later the Nobel prize was awarded to two of the founders of the Higgs theory, Peter

Higgs and Francois Englert.

 

Left out of the prize, however, were the scientists who actually made the theory come true.

 

Modern particle physics is a combination of subtle thought, Brobdingnagian machines and computations and industrial-strength organizational discipline. CERN spent 20 years and $6 billion to build the collider, 17 miles around, in

which to collide subatomic particles at the speed of ligh, producing microscopic fireballs that could congeal into particles not yet known, including the Higgs.

 

Two competing teams of 3,000 scientists and technicians each built 7-story underground detectors to record and analyze the results of these collisions. They are supposed to operate in strict secrecy, speaking only through their elected spokespersons and in papers signed by the name of the collaboration. Individual contributions are supposed to be anonymous. The price of speaking out of turn can be expulsion from the collaboration – in essence excommunication from the future of physics.

 

“Chasing the Higgs” was based on seven years of visits and interviews with dozens inside and outside of CERN, drilling down through the hifting bureaucracies of the experiment teams to find the crucial individuals and breakpoints, the detours and breakthroughs, that led to the eventual triumph. No other news organization, to my knowledge, has attempted such a deep account.

 

I got to know lifers like Sau Lan Wu, whose lifelong pursuit of the Higgs particle brought her nearly to ruin, and graduate students only a year removed from classrooms, who were suddenly charged with sifting the final data. The 

reporting continued to unfold right up to the weekend before publication, when feuding scientists sent me the transcript of a final crucial meeting.

 

The response of readers to this package was ecstatic. It zoomed to the top of the most emailed list and generated hundreds of reader comments. I will only quote from one of them.

 

“What a beautiful achievement for mankind! Truly beautiful,” wrote a reader from Olathe, Kansas. “Thank you NY Times for reporting on this so beautifully. Your journalism does the discovery justice. Now if only someone can make a nice film about it I'll watch it over and over again :)"

 

Thank you for your attention,

 

Sincerely,

Dennis Overbye

New York Times