While the students of the world enjoyed a well-deserved summer vacation, physicists around the world were hard at work substantiating long debated theories. On July 4th, scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, announced the discovery of the God particle. Immediately, people around the world began to ask: what is the God particle, and why exactly does it matter? Is there even anything “Godly” about it?
To understand the particle, at hand let’s back up a little and examine all the hard work that has been done in pursuit of this discovery. For the past several years, scientists have been working hundreds of feet below the earth on the border between France and Switzerland. There, an oval tunnel exists that spans seventeen miles in circumference. The tunnel contains a complex machine that is complete with metal structures, magnets, and wires; this instrument is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. Its purpose is simple and yet, at the same time, very complex: to explain the physical world as we know it.
The accelerator at CERN, called the Large Hadron Collider, includes two sub-parts that essentially shoot proton beams in opposite directions. With the help of magnets, the beams converge at designated areas within the tunnel, allowing for particles to collide at the speed of light. These superfast collisions transform matter into pockets of energy which will eventually re-shape themselves into new forms.
Perhaps the biggest fear that has surrounded this immense project is about just how much science will really succeed in discovering. Scientists around the world find themselves at a turning point now that the discovery of the “God particle” was announced earlier this summer. This discovery is widely considered so groundbreaking that some go as far as to equate it with Einstein’s discovery of the theory of relativity.
The discovery is beyond the scope of Newton, Bohr, and Einstein’s wildest dreams. Physicists, perhaps for the first time, have the opportunity to answer fundamental questions about creation; specifically, how a spacious universe emerged from an infinitely dense one. According to science, the universe should really be empty. However, as day to day existence proves, this is not the case. The LHC experiments are designed to explain how the universe grew with just enough matter to allow for the existence of all subsequent forms. The “God particle” is thought to give all particles mass, without which we wouldn’t exist. It can be considered, metaphorically at least, the “cosmic glue” that holds the universe together.
The theories formulated to answer these questions were first proposed 48 years ago by British scientist, Peter Higgs, along with two other teams of scientists. At the July 4th conference, Mr. Higgs was moved to tears by the discovery because he felt fortunate that it occurred during his lifetime. His theories have famously led to a quest to discover the existence of the proposed God particle, or the Higgs boson as it is more commonly referred to by scientists. The label God particle was coined after the title of Leon Lederman’s book on the topic. Although the particle is both important and mysterious, the nickname is strongly disliked by physicists, who regard it as inappropriate term since the particle has nothing to do with God. So why did Mr. Lederman choose this as the title for his book if there are no Godly connotations? Perhaps it was a marketing ploy, or because the goal of the Higgs boson is to gain insight into the nature of the universe. Either way, scientists have started to refer to the particle as the “Goddamn where is it particle” because of the expense it has caused.
CERN scientists are more than 99 percent certain they’ve discovered the Higgs- boson, or at the least a new particle exactly where they expected the Higgs to be. Their July 4th announcement was made only after a five-sigma result was confirmed, which means that there is less than one in a million probability that the finding is due to chance. This is a great improvement since the December analysis, when only a two-sigma observation was reported. This has certainly been an important discovery, but there is still much more work to be done in substantiating it. Although the two teams believe that the particle has the same mass as a Higgs, they still have to determine whether other properties and behavior of the particle are in sync with the theory.
Many, largely from outside the scientific community, are thinking, “Who cares? Where’s the practicality in playing with particle guns? Money (an estimated $10 billion so far) and brainpower is being invested for nothing!” In truth, these cynics could not be more wrong. As humans, it is often our natural inclination to try to understand the universe. And that should suffice, in and of itself. But even with the discovery of the Higgs, will all of our questions ever be answered? We cannot pretend to know the answer to this question. One thing is certain though: the discovery of this particle has opened countless new doors to exciting avenues of exploration and potential discovery.