Monday, September 24, 2012

Marketing the Higgs boson

The level of media coverage (and hype) associated with the Higgs boson announcement in July caught me by surprise. But, then I realised that if you spend $10 billion on an experiment there must be some very small fraction associated with publicity and outreach. So I did some Googling and found this CERN document which gives the annual marketing budget as slightly less than $2 million. 
Combining this with 10,000 physicists from around the world hitting their local media outlets I should not have been surprised at the level of publicity.

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