Higgs boson in fiction

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The Higgs boson has appeared in several works of fiction in popular culture. These references rarely reflect the expected properties of the hypothetical elementary particle, or do so only vaguely, and often imbue it with fantastic properties.

  • In the science fantasy series Lexx, one character points out that although all-out nuclear war sometimes destroys all life on planets as advanced as Earth, it is much more common for such planets to be obliterated by physicists attempting to determine the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle, since the moment the mass is known the planet will instantly collapse into a nugget of super-dense matter "roughly the size of a pea."
  • In Stanisław Lem's Solaris, a space station crew deals with an inexplicable presence of other people, including absent or deceased friends and relatives — apparently the creations of an alien phenomenon they are studying. They discover that their visitors, when killed, always return to life, even if they attempt to kill themselves. (In the novel, these "ghosts" are described as being constructed from long-range energy fields derived from bound states of neutrinos.) In Steven Soderbergh's 2002 film adaptation, the script has a reference to Higgs bosons, absent in the original: "So, if we created a negative Higgs field, and bombarded them with a stream of Higgs anti-bosons, they might disintegrate."
  • In Brian Aldiss's White Mars an expedition is established to go to Mars to find Higgs bosons which is believed to hold the key in solving the question of where mass comes from. The reason that Mars is considered is that Earth and the Moon are "too noisy" from all the human activity for the experiment. The way they go about it is by having a ring with superconductive fluid, Argon 36, and waiting till they see an error which will signify a Higgs particle has passed through the fluid.
  • In Robert J. Sawyer's Flashforward an experiment at CERN to find Higgs particle causes the consciousness of the entire human race to be sent twenty years into the future.
  • In John Ringo's Into the Looking Glass the University of Central Florida is destroyed by a 60 kiloton explosion that is first thought to be a nuclear weapon, but turns out to be a mishap with a Higgs Boson. This also leads to gateways to other worlds and a war with the aliens on the other side of the gates.
  • In Richard Cox's The God Particle American business man Steve Keeley is thrown out of a window and falls three stories, but wakes up and begins to see the world in a different way--he is able to accurately predict future events, read others' thoughts, and manipulate his environment.
  • In Herman Wouk's A Hole In Texas, the real science behind the Higgs boson is used as a backdrop for a satire on Washington politics, the chase for funding in scientific communities, and Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, the Hollywood portion of the satire has much to do with the wild flights of fancy in evidence in many of the other entries on this list. Much of the plot is based on the real-life aborted Superconducting Super Collider project.
  • The particle also appears in other, non-narrative art forms: Frank Zappa's posthumously released album Trance-Fusion contains an instrumental track called 'Finding Higgs' Boson'.
  • On the 01-18-08 Episode Number: 73 Season Num: 4 CBS T.V. show NUMB3RS. Higgs-Boson was mentioned, when Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat), is asked by Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol), to help solve the Higgs Boson theory.
  • On the April 26, 2002 episode number 24 season number 4 T.V. show Lexx a Higgs Boson accelerator is used to determine the Higgs Boson mass.
  • In the Japanese science fiction anime Martian Sucessor Nadesico 'boson jumping', which is shown as the activation of a sort of temporary subspace wormhole by bending the laws of physics, plays a large role in the plot.
  • On the television show Numb3rs, Peter MacNicol's character Dr. Larry Fleinhardt is working as part of a team in search of the Higgs boson.