"They said when the collider goes on
Soon they'd see that elusive boson
Very soon we shall hear
Whether Cern finds it this year
But it's something I won't bet very much on."
— Shelly Glashow, Boston University. Nobel prize in physics, 1979
From a collection of physicists' statements on the Higgs boson in The Guardian. (Via Ed Yong)

  • OldBrownSquirrel

    I guess the physics departments haven’t been teaching poetic meter.

  • schadenfreudisch

    i had higher hopes for a limerick about the sexiest physics running.

    and yet, here i sit pelting it with slingshots instead of writing my own.  congratulations on your nobel prize, at least.

  • jinty

    Ow the scansion. How about

    They claimed that when LHC goes on
    They’d soon see that e-lusive boson
    We soon hope to hear
    That’s CERN’s found it this year
    But it’s not something I’d bet five doll-ars on

  • http://profiles.google.com/alphaminus Adam Kruckenberg

    The Higgs Boson might give us mass,
    So I hope that this doesn’t sound crass.
    Very soon we will hear,
    If they’ve found it this year.
    But this search is a pain in the …

    • http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker

      I appreciate your efforts to make a limerick about the Higgs Boson at least vaguely dirty. Good show, sir. 

  • http://twitter.com/elk_l elk_l

    It’s derived from the electroweak

    And should appear with an LHC tweak,

    But with this Higg’s boson

    They might be stringing us on

    With another unconfirmed leak.

  • rabidpotatochip

    There once was a lab we called CERN
    and their goal was simply to learn
    the cause of the mass
    in your mother’s large ass
    Yes, you read one that right.  Burn!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Oliver-Schmieding/100000452523362 Oliver Schmieding

    meanwhile, in the “the glass is half empty” department:

    in the quest to discover the boson
    i presume that the year is a close one
    when we’ll finally find
    that the last of it’s kind
    long ago died from mass – ive exhaustion

  • David Niall Wilson

    I would have hoped that – the meter of poetry being mathematical and all – that the limerick could at least be proper. 

    So they have a collidor at Cern,
    With which they have hopes they will learn,
    If a particle’s God,
    And if so, well, how odd
    But, I honestly don’t give a durn.