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Abstract

On July 4, 2012, experimental physicists on the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, inSwitzerland, announced the historic discovery of the Higgs boson. After analyzing trillionsof proton-to-proton collisions, two teams of physicists concluded that signatures ofdiphotons in thefinal state were evidence of the long-sought-after Higgs particle. The an-swerability of a particle search to polysemic signals raises a deeply provocative question:In what ways does a sign facilitate the discovery of a thing? Drawing onfieldwork at theLarge Hadron Collider complex, this article attempts to probe the semiosis of signaturesas a palimpsest of inherent possibilities spanning the width of the universe, which is nei-ther a contingent ordering of the Saussurean kind nor a brick-by-brick Peircean con-struct. What it eloquently foregrounds is the capacity of a class of signs to reflect the pres-ence of objects, even those that are materially nonexistent, which resolves many ametaphysical perplexity involving language, thought, and reality. In the process, this arti-cle makes a case for the role of meaningful, qualitative evaluations, which lie at the root ofexperimental searches, and explains how these qualitative evaluations are a more trust-worthy source of discoveries in particle physics than metrics or magnitudes.You would not seek me, if you had not found me.—Pascal (on God)