‘God Particle’ soon to be proven
The scientific world, and to a lesser degree the secular media, has been all aflutter thanks to the Large Hadron Collider, which is set to open sometime in June this year at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (known as CERN). British physicist Peter Higgs hopes that with the opening will come the discovery of ‘the God particle.’
More than 40 years ago, in 1964, Peter Higgs independently predicted the existence of what is now known as the Higgs boson particle. Wikipedia describes it as “a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics.”
Higgs predicted the existence of the particle while he was working at the University of Edinburgh, in an attempt to explain how atoms have weight. Without the Higgs boson particle, the basic physics theory, also known as the “standard model,” lacks a crucial element, in failing to explain how other subatomic particles like quarks and electronics do have mass.
The Higgs theory is that the bosons create a field through which the other particles pass. The particles that encounter difficulty going through the field as though they are passing through molasses pick up more inertia, and mass. Those that pass through more easily are lighter.
With the opening of the LHC later this year, Higgs hopes to soon after see proof of the particle to which he leant his name. He’s hoping to see proof before he turns 80 in May of 2009, but failing that, “I’ll just have to ask my GP to keep me alive a bit longer,” he told reporters recently.
The LHC will be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, exceeding that of the current powerhouse, the Tevatron at the rival Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago. Higgs allows for the possibility that the Tevatron has already found the Higgs boson, but that it could be lost within the amount of data.
At CERN, in addition to the 17 mile long tunnel that crosses under the Swiss-French border, a farm of 3,000 computers stand waiting to process the information. One of the largest computer farms in the world, it will be in a position to sort through the sheer wealth of data and produce about a hundred collisions that will be of most interest to researchers.
This, from a particle accelerator which will create billions of collisions between particles sped up to 99.9999 percent of the speed of light in the 27 kilometer long tunnel.
Should the particle be shown to exist, Higgs is planning to celebrate. “I shall open a bottle of something. It will be champagne — whisky takes a little more time to drink,” he says.
As for the bad publicity for the LHC, sparked by doomsday reports of black holes being created enough to swallow the planet, and chunks of the universe, Higgs had this to say; “This black hole business has become rather inflated because even theorists suggesting many black holes could be produced are not predicting large black holes which would swallow up large chunks of the universe.”
“I think the publicity about that got out of hand and some people have misunderstood,” he added.
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Peter Higgs told journalists in Geneva he doesn’t like the term “God particle” because it might offend believers — even though he is not one himself. More on the Reuters religion blog FaithWorld at http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/04/09/is-god-particle-the-right-term-for-massive-mystery-in-physics/