We may remember Diamond for a few years. The politicians whom he embarrasses or confuses may last a little longer. But for certain, everyone concerned in this shamelessness will be utterly obscure by the end of the century. Names on an archived web page.
It is different for the physics. Today the incontestably pre-eminent intellectual programme of the postwar period came to an end. Sixty years of continuous, shared, effort. The mid-century struggle to tease out the structure behind the stamp-collector's paradise of nuclear physics. The floods of new particles poured out by the early accelerators. The unification of the forces of nature and the conceptual reversal of the asymmetry that created a universe. Data to theory to hypothesis to experiment to data and round again and again, culminating in the LHC, the most extraordinary instrument ever built.
No-one knows if this is the Higgs or a Higgs. So we don't know whether this will crown the standard model of physics or make its difficulties unmanageable. Either way, the physics that happens now, the new observations, are new. Gravity and general relativity haven't gone away. Neutrinos have mass, but why THOSE masses? and where do all those arbitrary ratios come from anyway? Why does all the really weird stuff always tie in with the electro-weak force? The universe is too heavy, too: what's that about? Deliciously, the LHC is not running anywhere near full power. There is a lot more data to gather from protons, and then they can load the beams with lead nuclei to make great gobs of quark soup, or feed in electrons from the LEP in the same tunnel. It all works, the first fruits are gathered in, but the tree will yield for years yet.
Regardless of discoveries to come, today, this year, is a milestone. If the civilisation of Earth endures, then 2012 will be will be taught to generations of bored teenagers as one of those rare moments when physics reaches a conceptual unity. And if it does not, if all our learning and skill lead into dust, then the historians who discover us will write, at the head of the epitaph they raise over our ruins, that we experimentally explored the whole of the standard model.
