My friend James alerted me to this news on the science frontier. According to the Guardian, the Large Hadron Collider or L.H.C. as it is known by some (simply as Cern by others) is warming up as of late February to begin looking for the mysterious Higgs Boson particle (its been elusive and they haven't found it in earlier searches). It has been dubbed the “God Particle” and a lot of articles about it seem to be complicated (unnecessarily so) maybe because they are written by scientists and not by writers (who are used to explaining things so that people can actually understand them).
So, the question of “Science Wednesday” (Yes, this is totally a play on N.P.R.'s Science Friday) is simply, what is the Higgs Boson?
Well first, its name comes from a Physicist as unassuming as you or I. His name is Peter Higgs. Secondly, the Higgs Boson is an idea formulated many years ago to explain why matter has mass.
See, physicists noticed when looking at extremely tiny particles of matter, that all things weren’t equal. They dubbed this phenomenon the “particle zoo” as simply put…some pieces of matter were inexplicably of different shape and size than others. For example: Did you know that there's so much empty space inside matter that the entire human race could be squeezed into the volume of a sugar cube?
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Enter...the Particle Zoo! I bet you were expecting "Enter the Dragon" and some variation of Bruce Lee web-fu! However, Charlie can vouch that my web-fu is indeed mighty. |
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Jedi Master Yoda AS IF he needed an introduction. If he did need an introduction, I would snort derisively at you (while simultaneously flexing my bad writing/ adverbial skills). One of the quotes he is most famous for is when he's speaking with Luke on Dagobah. He says (of the Force), "Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. ... For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.” Doesn't that sound a lot like the Higgs Boson field? |
A wild idea was spawned in the mind of Dr. Peter Higgs in an attempt to explain this phenomenon. He said that there was this invisible force field that gave matter its shape. Personally, I think that Yoda or even George Lucas should have got the credit).
In other words, an invisible field makes a pear look like a pear or makes you look like you and me look like…well, me (although I wish I looked like Bradley James). And because all fields thus far discovered in the universe have a particle associated with them, it made logical sense that if this field does indeed exist, then there has to be a particle for it.
This is also why the Higgs particle is oftentimes called the “God Particle” and given my explanation above, you can see why. If one particle connected to a field were responsible for interacting with matter in such a way as to make it possible to arrange into shapes…then this could for many of us be as close to a literal definition of God as science allows.
Much now seems to rest on the detection of the Higgs particle and the “mysterious” field to which it is associated. One of the great enigmas of particle physics is why charge and other quantum attributes occur in integer quantities while mass, the most fundamental property of all matter and energy (and, not coincidentally, the basis of gravitation), does not.
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| It's still frickin' ugly even if it is a classic car. My brother may disagree as he's a car nut but...whatever. |
So yeah…the multi-billion dollar L.H.C. is essentially this huge toy built so that physicists could go hunting for a particle that may or may not exist. The key is that the colliders they had to work with before the L.H.C. simply didn’t have enough juice (You’d think that America…home of Viagra, Levitra…and others would have tried harder to keep the largest super-collider on our soil). As it is, now the Europeans have the biggest tool. The hope is that they’ll smash protons apart so completely that the Higgs particle will be detected and then we can all sleep at night again, knowing that there is a particle that explains why the Edsel was so butt ugly.
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| I IZ IN UR COLLIDER LOOKIN' FOR BLK HOLZ |