Maybe Peter Higgs shouldn’t have stayed home. The 80 year old Scottish physicist, famous for the elusive mass-conferring particle named after him, didn’t make it to APS on Monday, when he was supposed to receive the Sakurai Prize along with five other theorists who played important roles in developing the theories that predict the particle.

His absence — or perhaps the elevation of the five others involved in the prize — seems to be affecting the way that physicists talk about the particle. Rob Roser of Fermilab gave a talk this morning about how the Tevatron still has time to discover the Higgs boson before the LHC really gets going. And sometimes Roser called it the Higgs. But he also referred to it as the “BEHHGK Boson” — Roser pronounces it “Beck” — for Brout, Englert, Higgs, Hagen, Guralnik, and Kibble, the six men receiving the prize. Doesn’t quite trip off the tongue, does it?

Allright folks, that’s it for me this year. I had a great time re-connecting with a bunch of physicists, and I look forward to doing the same next year in a warmer climate: Anaheim, California.

Like many other outlets, I covered the announcements from Brookhaven’s RHIC collider yesterday. Read about the 4 trillion degree measurement on the main Nature News site.

Have you ever seen the videos of stars whirling around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way? They’re wild. But wouldn’t you want to see pictures of the black hole itself?

On Saturday at APS, there were talks showing how two rival approaches are getting up close and personal to the hole, called Sagittarius A*. One group even says that they will soon be able to actually image the hole — and that the data they have already shows that the hole’s accretion disk is oblique to use, rather than facing us perpendicularly, like a doughnut.

By analyzing the orbits of those nearby stars, astronomers already know the mass of Sgr A* quite precisely — it has swallowed the equivalent mass of four million Suns. But the second fundamental characteristic in defining a black hole is its spin, which would explain something about the history of the hole — a sort of timeline of its appetite — that in turn would help explain the history of the galaxy. And David Merritt of RIT said that scientists are close to spotting the spin. He just needs to find two stars within 20 astronomical units (an AU, or the distance between the Earth and Sun) of the hole and track them. And he says a new instrument, called GRAVITY, expected to be put onto ESO’s VLT in a few years, should do the trick.

While the VLT will peer past the Milky Way’s dust to get at Sgr A* in the near infrared, Shep Doeleman at MIT wants to use radio telescopes to achieve an incredible resolution that he compares to reading the date off a quarter held up in Los Angeles from Washington DC. He has already linked up three radio telescopes — arrays in California, Arizona and Hawaii — giving him an effective baseline of a single telescope 4,500 kilometres across. In a 2008 Nature paper, he used this set up to show that the Sgr A* was one-third of an AU across — which essentially proves that Sgr A* is a black hole, since nothing else could fill up that small of a space with that much mass.

At APS, Doeleman announced that with new data from his radio arrays, he now knows something about the shape of the accretion disk of gas that is feeding the black hole. Instead of facing us like a doughnut, the accretion disk is probably somewhat edge-on or oblique to the Earth. “It’s not as sexy as it used to be,” says Doeleman. Eventually, he wants to bolster his virtual telescope by adding more than a dozen stations in Chile, Antarctica and elsewhere. At that point, this Event Horizon Telescope would be able to make time lapse movies of the hole’s surface, which could be spinning and have hotspots. The animation shown here gives a sense of what some of the researchers think they can achieve.

In the basement of the hotel, among the booths hawking physics T-shirts and classroom aids, I found this sad, telling booth. Click below to see the note left on the empty table by an anonymous critic.

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Is the censorship of sensitive science becoming more or less pronounced? Yesterday, during a session on ‘science and secrecy’, Steven Aftergood, who leads the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, had numbers that told a mixed tale.

On the hand, he said, there were 23 million classification decisions in 2008, up from 8.6 million in 2001 and 3.5 million in 1995. These 2008 decisions were made by 4,000 government classifiers, and cost taxpayers $9.85 billion. And with science from World War I still restricted, Aftergood says that bureaucratic inertia resists the more open dissemination of scientific knowledge.

On the other hand, Aftergood pointed out that the amount of classified science, as a percentage of all science, is shrinking fast. And, because of a presidential order in December, all agencies are conducting a review of their dozens of classification schemes with an eye towards eliminating ones that are obsolete or inappropriate.

Perhaps that will lead to a world where there is less wanton secrecy. Peter Galison of Harvard was also on hand, partly to promote his new movie, in which he asserts that the US government classifies five times as many pages of information as are added to the Library of Congress.

During a press conference today, I was pleased to meet the artist Jim Sanborn, a specialist in scientific sculptures who is probably one of the Washington DC’s most important artists. Sanborn is currently most famous for a piece, pictured here, that sits near the entrance to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Using techniques taught to him by a former CIA spook, Sanborn in 1990 created the undulating copper screen with its 1,800 encrypted characters. Most have already been hacked, and the letters translate to three ambiguous and slightly sinister messages. But the last part, 97 or 98 characters long, has remained unsolved. Sanborn, a tall, rugged man at once both coy and curmudgeonly, says he wouldn’t mind if it stayed unsolved for another 20 years, even after his “demise”. (According to Wired, his will contains the solution.) I asked Jim to throw a bone to the armies of amateur cryptologists who hang on his every word. He said that they should wait for a book he’s working on that will “contain more clues.”

Jim also described a forthcoming work, one that will open this summer in Denver. It looks terrifying and magnificent, and continues to reflect his interest in the history of nuclear weapons. In an earlier work, called “Atomic Time”, Sanborn recreated Manhattan Project equipment, like nuclear still-lifes – and even reconstructed bomb models that pretty much just needed uranium or plutonium to work. For the new show, called “Terrestrial Physics”, Sanborn built a working Van de Graaf particle accelerator that he uses to actually fission uranium – having modeled the giant pieces after stuff he found gathering dust nearby at the Carnegie Institutes of Washington, where in 1939, physicists made one of the first confirmations that fission existed. Part of the point, he says, is to show how relatively easy it is to build the equipment and infrastructure of nuclear weapons some 70 years after it all began. “I felt that it was important for people to see the real thing,” he says. “So far a nuclear device has never failed to work. It’s that easy. The whole point is, absolutely, to reduce and stop the production of fissile materials.”

Image: CIA

So the physicists have arrived in Washington DC for the April APS meeting to find themselves surrounded by a couple feet of snow. This is because the April meeting, this year, is in February. Nice one. Normally, February wouldn’t be so bad in Washington. This year was different. For arriving physicists who have somehow ignored the news over the last week, Washington has been hit by two blizzards within a single week. First was Snowpocalypse (aka Snowmageddon), followed up four days later by Snoverkill. But everyone seems to be cozy here in the Mariott Woodley Park hotel, and attendance isn’t down too much. I hope to check in through the President’s Day weekend with newsy bits and blurbs.

Image: Cycle the Ghost Round via Flickr

The Fermi space telescope has reported seeing an excess of high-energy electrons that could hint at dark-matter annihilation in the universe. Full story is available here.

I’m set to head to the airport in a bit, and so this is sayonara. As usual, I didn’t get to half the sessions that I wanted to, but that’s part of the appeal. Just to keep us on our toes, it looks like APS is having its next April meeting in February. But it will be in Washington, DC, my home, so I’ll be happy to offer insider tours. I’m a journalist, so my rates are cheap!

The mysterious origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays is, it seems, still a mystery. Two years ago, scientists at the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina thought they had it solved. They published a paper in Science, based on two dozen particles, that there was a correlation with the location of Active Galactic Nuclei — supermassive black holes that accelerate jets of material at near-light speed throughout the universe. At the time of the announcment, there was some doubt: The Hi-Res project, which scans the northern sky like Auger does the south, found no such correlation.

And now, today, Stefan Westerhoff, an Auger scientist from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that, based on new particle detections — they have more than 50 now — the correlation no longer holds. “The signal strength is certainly considerably weaker now,” he told his audience. “This is certainly a disappointment.”

But the correlation isn’t so weak that they can give up. The 70% correlation between the cosmic rays and the AGN at the time of the Science publication has now dropped to about 40% — considerably less, but not enough to support the null hypothesis. What could cause some particles to come from AGN, but not others? Westerhoff says it might have something to do with their composition. Maybe the protons come from the AGN, whereas higher mass cosmic rays, say iron nuclei, do not.

Westerhoff says this will be sorted out as they track more particles — which can only come with more time and bigger detectors. If Pierre Auger is the size of Rhode Island, the proposed Pierre Auger North, not too far from Denver, would be the size of Massachusetts — and Westerhoff showed a slide how they can get the necessary statistics in a decade or two. No offense to the lovely state of Colorado, but I say keep the cow pasture free of Cerenkov detectors, and give folks like JEM–EUSO a chance to stick their 2.5-meter camera on the space station.

Image: Pierre Auger