“कोवळे दिवस"-व्यंकटेश माडगूळकर, एक अस्वस्थ अनुभव

The recent discovery of the Higgs particle -- the "God" particle -- will go down in the history of science as one of the greatest discoveries ever made. But what was discovered, exactly? Was it a discovery of a "particle" that grants mass to other elements of matter, or was it the discovery that thousands of scientists focusing on a large data set of seemingly random events can successfully skew the results of the data into a 5-sigma level of apparent statistical significance?

In other words, was the Higgs discovery actually the greatest intention experiment ever conducted? This is not a casual question. It reaches into the very nature of science itself and begs the question: Can human-run science ever truly be conducted independent from an observer? The answer, of course, is no. The subsequent question then becomes critical: Do observers alter the outcomes of scientific experiments even without any