What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? My favorite story of the past week is the possible discovery of the Higgs particle, which would be a huge advance for physics.

Also on my radar: the embarrassing end of Representative Thad McCotter’s political career. The onetime presidential candidate (noticed by few Iowans besides former House Speaker Chris Rants) resigned from Congress. His days as a legislator were numbered anyway, because of his failure to accomplish one of the most basic campaign tasks: collecting enough signatures to qualify for the primary ballot.

Clips are after the jump. This is an open thread.

I didn’t get beyond high school physics, so everything I know about the Higgs particle comes from the children’s book by Lucy Hawking and Stephen Hawking, George and the Big Bang. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is a major plot element in that book, the third in a trilogy that is essential reading for science-loving kids. Fantastic stuff.

Anyway, the Higgs particle has been just a theory for about 50 years. The Bad Astronomy blog explained why this week’s discovery of a “new fundamental particle” is massive:

The Higgs particle is extremely important, because the Standard Model of particle physics – the basic idea of how all particles behave – predicts it exists and is what (indirectly) gives many other particles mass. In other words, the reason electrons, protons, and neutrons have mass is because of this Higgs beastie. Last year, the Guardian put up a nice article explaining this. A more technical discussion is on Discover Magazine’s Cosmic Variance blog from 2007. Sean Carroll has been live-blogging the announcement, and has lots of good info as well.

This particle is very hard to detect, because it doesn’t live long. Once it forms it decays in a burst of energy and other particles (think of them as shrapnel) extremely rapidly. The only way to make them is to smash other particles together at incredibly high energies, and look at the resulting collisions. If the Higgs exists, then it will decay and give off a characteristic bit of energy. The problem is, lots of things give off that much energy, so you have to see the Higgs signal on top of all that noise.

So, you have to collide particles over and over again, countless times, to build up that tiny signal from the Higgs decay. The more you do it, the bigger the signal gets, and the more confident you can be that the detection is real. I described all this in detail last December, when preliminary results from LHC were announced.

That live-blog is worth a read. I love that physicists were camping out to get a seat in the auditorium where they scheduled the announcement.

I love that Peter Higgs not only lived to see the day, but was healthy enough to travel to Switzerland for the event.

I love that Stephen Hawking owes University of Michigan physicist Gordon Kane $100 after betting that the Higgs particle would never be found.

I love the explosion of geeky Higgs Boson jokes.

Higgs didn’t invent the concept all on his own, of course:

Dr. Higgs was one of six physicists, working in three independent groups, who in 1964 invented what came to be known as the Higgs field. The others were Tom Kibble of Imperial College, London; Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester; Dr. Guralnik of Brown University; and François Englert and Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles. […]

Along the way the Higgs boson achieved a notoriety rare in abstract physics. To the eternal dismay of his colleagues, Leon Lederman, the former director of Fermilab, called it the “God particle,” in his book of the same name, written with Dick Teresi. (He later said that he had wanted to call it the “goddamn particle.”)

Finding the missing boson was one of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider.

In times of budget scarcity, government funding for basic scientific research is likely to be on the chopping block. I hope the publicity surrounding this week’s news helps to educate people about the value of basic scientific research, in addition to the applied research that is easier to grasp.

Speaking of the basics, I cannot believe that a five-term incumbent like Republican Thad McCotter of Michigan flunked the elementary task of qualifying for the ballot. This guy wanted to run the country, but he couldn’t even hire campaign staff capable of collecting 1,000 signatures. Seriously, how incompetent could his staff be?

The Michigan Secretary of State’s office announced last week that of the 1,833 signatures McCotter’s campaign submitted to qualify for the GOP primary ballot, only 244 were valid. Hundreds of the signatures were apparently photocopied, digitally altered and re-pasted multiple times onto blank petition forms, said Fred Woodhams, a spokesman for the Michigan State Department.

While it is extremely rare for a congressional incumbent to fail to meet the basic requirement of 1,000 signatures to be on the primary ballot, Woodhams said it is “unheard of” for so many signatures to be valid.

“Certainly people are trying to think of similar instances and no one is coming up with anything,” Woodhams said.

So with his congressional career cut short and his White House aspirations extinguished, McCotter, 46, and his campaign staff are now under investigation for fraud.

McCotter quickly abandoned plan B, running a Congressional campaign as a write-in. On Friday, he resigned from the U.S. House. His written statement was more memorable than most congressional press releases:

“Today I have resigned from the office of United States Representative for Michigan’s 11th Congressional District,” McCotter wrote in a statement. “After nearly 26 years in elected office, this past nightmarish month and a half have, for the first time, severed the necessary harmony between the needs of my constituency and of my family. As this harmony is required to serve, its absence requires I leave.” […]

In his Friday statement, McCotter wrote: “The recent event’s totality of calumnies, indignities and deceits have weighed most heavily upon my family. Thus, acutely aware one cannot rebuild their hearth of home amongst the ruins of their U.S. House office, for the sake of my loved ones I must ‘strike another match, go start anew’ by embracing the promotion back from public servant to sovereign citizen.”

McCotter said he was leaving office in order to “find gainful employment to help provide for my family; and continue to assist, in any way they see fit, the Michigan attorney general’s earnest and thorough investigation, which I requested, into the 2012 petition filing.”

“While our family takes this step into the rest of our lives, we do so with the ultimate confidence in our country’s future,” McCotter wrote. “Truly, it is a challenging and fortunate time to live in our blessed sanctuary of liberty.”

No matter how high you rise in politics, you can’t afford to take your eye off the ball.