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In 2012, an international team of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss/French border announced they had demonstrated the existence of the elusive Higgs Boson. This was a monumental effort. It took more than 10,000 scientists ten years to build the LHC and a further four years to reveal the Higgs Boson.
The LHC cost more than $4bn. It is the most complex machine ever built. It creates and accelerates beams of protons around a 27Km ring to within 0.000000009% of the speed of light. To process the vast quantities of data produced as trillions of protons collide each day, the LHC has a network of 100,000 linked computers around the world. The LHC collects and processes data equivalent to the entire Google databank every three days.
Despite this gargantuan effort, the team and LHC are not CERTAIN they have found the Higgs Boson. Their data suggests a 4.9 sigma level of confidence—the chance that they are wrong is one in 2 million.
Meanwhile in a window-less meeting room at an office in Columbia Street, Seattle, five men and two women are discussing a 2 million-year-old fossil hominid found in South Africa. Australopithecus sediba is a candidate for the last link between australopithecines and our genus Homo.
The people at this meeting are endowed with a certainty the scientists at the LHC lack. They are 100% CERTAIN the truth is to be found in a book written between 2 - 4 thousand years ago by people who lacked scientific instruments, who knew nothing about the size of the universe and nothing about the composition of matter. They did not even know the shape of the Earth. Their most advanced technological achievement was a bronze sword.
But they had something possibly more important—they believed they were the chosen people of a god who created the entire universe in six days.
A tall man with a shock of brown hair picked up a marker pen and turned to the whiteboard, “Ok, let’s get down to business. How do we discredit australopithecus sediba?”
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