The Search for the God-Particle
Seventy-nine year old Professor Peter Higgs believes that the God-Particle will be found by the simple act of switching on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Researcher (CERN), located below the Franco-Swiss border. And now that the switch has been turned on, he still feels it is necessary to understand how particles acquire mass, recognizing that by turning on the machine something will eventually be found to better understand electromagnetic interactions.
Professor Higgs is the one who came up with the idea in 1964 that there must exist a background field that would “act rather like treacle.” The particles that would be passing through it would acquire mass by being dragged through a mediator, dubbed the “Higgs Boson” which was derived through his breakthrough theory 44-years ago.
Today, the LHC has cost over 5.46 billion dollars (3.76 billion euros) (six billion Swiss frances) to develop, with the total purpose of resolving physic enigmas—why particles have mass; more in-depth explanations about “dark matter” and “dark energy” which involves 96% of the cosmos; and answering the question “do other dimensions exist in parallel to our own.” The blip this morning was of cosmic proportions, offering the physics a new tool to probe the birth of our universe.
Once the world’s largest atom smasher was turned on this early Wednesday morning, which will allow them to reveal how the tiniest particles first created the original “big bang”—the massive explosive that formed our universe’s stars, planets, and everything in between. When the two firings of the beam of protons—clockwise and counter clockwise—went around the 17-mile tunnel of the deep collider, they formed white flashing dots on the blue screen of the control room which showed a successful crossing of the finish line. “The first technical challenge has been met,” said a jubilant Robert Aymar, director-general of CERN. “What you have just seen is the result of 20 years of effort. It all went like clockwork. Now it’s for the physicists to show us what they can do. They are ready to go for discoveries. Man has always shown he wants to know where he comes from and where he will go, where the universe comes from and where it will go. So here we’re looking at essential questions for mankind.”
“It appears to be several weeks before any significant findings will be found from the collisions:
The beams will gradually be filled with more protons and fired at near the speed of light in opposite directions around the tunnel, making 11,000 circuits a second. They will travel down the middle of two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder than outer space. At four points in the tunnel, the scientist will use giant magnets to cross the beams and cause protons to collide. The collider’s two largest detectors — essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons — are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.” (yahoo news.)
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
