The shabby, dingy beauty of the Higgs boson-hunters" lair My mission at Cern was slightly bizarre: to interview its staff about an album they'd made. To my surprise, it wasn't a novelty record, but proper pop and classical music, played to a highly professional standard. I shouldn't have been shocked. These scientists are so driven that excelling in just one field is rather beneath them. If they play the violin, they'll be concert-standard; if they cycle, they'll race up an Alp before breakfast. Yet there are some areas where they're just like the rest of us. I was once told that the female scientists tend to marry male colleagues, since only they can give them a decent conversation. Does the same hold true of the men, I asked. "Oh no," said my source. For some reason, brains don't seem to be the deciding factor - at least for the older male staff. Groans all round yesterday when David Cameron leapt on the physics bandwagon, with a jibe about Labour's sense of shame being harder to find than the Higgs. But then, even when physics jokes do work, it's normally not because they're funny per se, but because they allow speaker and audience to share in the tiny conspiracy of knowing a particular rule or axiom. These two gags, for example, knock "em dead at the conventions. The Higgs boson walks into a Catholic church, and the priest says: 'What are you doing here? The Higgs says: 'Well, you can't have mass without me." " Then there's the one about the Uncertainty Principle, which holds that you can know the position of a particle, or its velocity, but not both. Schrödinger and Heisenberg are speeding down the motorway, and get stopped by the police. Do you know how fast you were going?" says the officer. 'No," says Heisenberg, 'but I can tell you exactly where we are..." "