Now the superstitious fear a broken mirror,
Whilst science follows rationality,
Yet if there's one thing that a physicist can simply not abide,
That's finding nature has a broken symmetry.
If you've ever tried to weigh a ray of sunlight,
You'll know that it's a very tricky thing to try,
For the photons in a ray light massless,
Unlike the particles with mass that go to make up you or I.
But it seems our standard model's not symmetrical,
Or else it's bosons would all have mass the same,
So there has to be a field, that will only be revealed,
By its boson and Higgs will be its name.
They're looking for the boson giving mass to matter,
The model only holds if it exists.
The way they're finding's by hadron colliding,
It's a hell of a way to go hunting for a higgs.
So when they'd finished all the calculations,
The only way to solve the mystery,
Was to accelerate some protons and watch as they collide,
In the biggest machine that ever was built in all of history.
It needed 27 kilometres of tunnel,
100 metres neath some alpine hills,
It took 111 nations working in cahoots,
Cos its the only way they'd ever pay bill.
But hunting out a higgs amongst the debris of collision,
Is like looking for a needle in a haystack made of needles,
When the needle that you're looking for is really an invisible sort of needle,
And very quickly changes into other types of needle,
So they need a big computer just to sort through all the needles,
And do the necessary number crunching needed to determine
If a higgs like needle needed to be there
And this simile's been taken much to far.