Monday 1 April 2013

April Fools'13: Peter Higgs arrested in Argentina

Higgs with the corpus delicti.
Unbelievable but true.  It happened last Saturday but only now credible reports are beginning to emerge. Peter Higgs, the physicist who first postulated the existence of a boson discovered last year at the LHC,  was arrested in the Buenos Aires airport on a way back from a symposium in his honor at the University of Rosario. Reportedly, a total of 1.25kg of cocaine was found sewn into plush models of elementary particles that Higgs carried in his luggage. Higgs denies any involvement in drug trafficking, maintaining that the plush models were a gift from a young woman attending his lecture in Rosario. The whole story bears some resemblance to the case of Paul Frampton, another theoretical particle physicist arrested in Argentina last year.  
Given the limited information,  one should not jump into conclusions. Higgs might have been a victim of a set-up: it is odd that two British physicists get arrested in Buenos Aires one after another in such similar circumstances. But, maybe, we should pose ourselves the question whether there exists a deeper relationship between the cocaine trade and theoretical particle physics? The recent dramatic events (and some of the particle physics literature too) certainly  make such a relationship plausible.  

I will update on this story as soon as new facts come to life.

Evening update: This article is an April Fools joke, one in a very bad taste as typical for this blog. Consequently, the current head count of  1 theoretical particle physicist in Argentinian jails remains up to date. So far. On the other hand, I think the idea of smuggling cocaine in plush models of elementary particles is absolutely brilliant :-) 

26 comments:

Anonymous said...

Incredible. Poor fellow.

Danny said...

It'll be the first time in history the Nobel prize medal is being sent to jail ;-)

Peter H said...

Some people don't actually find April Fools' Day amusing, you know.

-P.H.

Anonymous said...

Happy April fools' day!

Tom Weidig said...

Could there be a correlation or even a causal link between today's date "April 1st" and the content of this blog post? ;-)

Anonymous said...

Good one for April fool's day...

L. Edgar Otto said...

Obviously the blokes of Cambridgeshire cannot escape to Brazil or Paraguay after losing the cold war in aether physics. The rule of the laws of Heisenberg will eventually find them all- if our covert variables probe finer in the collider and the Planck map survey.

L. Edgar Otto

Anonymous said...

Fool's day stories with people ain't nice

Alain said...

Yet, it is April 1st...

Anonymous said...

April Fool's...nice trick, Jester!

Anonymous said...

Will they put him in the same cell with Frampton?

Tatsuo Tabata said...

It's April fool. But ...?

Vladimir Kalitvianski said...

According to the police officer, P. Higgs is accused for having broken symmetry for the sake of patching massless and unrealistic theory.

Anonymous said...

Darn, this is not true !!!

When will physicists finally learn to stay away from countries like Argentina, which have no functioning legal system but are driven by corruptnes and immorality instead?

Now, international physics and more general scientific organisations should really do soemthing about these Argentinian rascals!

Dilaton

Anonymous said...

Oh LOL, I did not consider the date :-D

Bazinga ?

Dilaton

Anonymous said...

Not funny at all, really.

Anonymous said...

Come on: it's a joke!
How's it possible that one gets fooled into unknowingly carrying cocaine on a plane?

Paul F.

Δρ. Τίνα Νάντσου https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3436-7188 said...

Xaxaxaxa what a joke!

Anonymous said...

Jester,

Your sense of humor is brilliant. Please don't be excessively apologetic, it's April Fool's day and people ought to loosen up...

Smile gentlemen, life is too short to take everything in a most serious note!

Jester said...

Was I apologetic? Sorry, i didn't mean to ;-)

Anonymous said...

"This article is an April Fools joke, one in a very bad taste as typical for this blog".

Sounds apologetic to me...

Anonymous said...

More on the Higgs story : The Novel Committee decided to remove both P.H. and P.F. from the list of Nobel Prize contenders, and proposes to name the recently discovered particle the Brout-Englert boson... The Moriond organizers support this measure in an enthusiastic way. A prominent british physicist retorted "B & E never mentioned the existence of a physical scalar resonance. We should name it the X boson". The Fermilab management supports this initiative.

pierop said...

Peter Higgs admitted he had a tiny amount of that matter for personal use. However, he was not able to explain how a large mass, around 1.25 kg according to Argentinian officers, could appear from such a vanishing quantity.

Csiki Attila-József said...

1.25 kg coco... please don't say the number didn't arouse ANY suspition!

Anonymous said...

Is 1.25 kg the mass of the Higgsino ????

Anonymous said...

The real WTF is the fact that cocaine (as well as many other naturally occurring substances) is illegal to own.