GOD PARTICLE

What is Higgs boson – and will CERN scientists find the 'God particle'?

CERN scientists are today successfully crashing particles together at nearly the speed of light. With such high-speed collisions, they hope to finally detect the elusive Higgs boson.

Like followers of God, followers of the Higgs boson act on faith. The Higgs boson has never been observed, and some physicists doubt it even exists.

In an attempt to prove the particle’s existence, physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) rammed protons together today at an energy level of about 7 trillion electron volts at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which straddles the border of Switzerland and France.

Type Higgs boson into Google and you get the search option ‘Higgs boson for dummies' as well as ‘Higgs boson time travel’ and ‘Higgs boson doesn’t want to be found.’

Here's a run-down about the so-called 'God particle.'

What is a boson?

A boson is a sub-atomic particle. The atomic particles are protons, neutrons, and electrons. While the Greek word atom means indivisible, modern scientists found atomic particles divisible into sub-atomic particles. These include quarks, leptons, and bosons. They were only hypothesized and observed in the last century.

This is according to the Standard Model of physics, the most accepted universal theory of everything.

What is the Higgs boson?

The Higgs Boson is the particle that is believed to provide mass to a body. Its like sun making life on earth possible. There is no definition for Higgs Boson because no one has really seen it yet. But Observing the Higgs boson would give credence to the Standard Model and help explain the origin of mass and the four forces of nature – (1) electromagnetism, (2) the strong force (which binds atomic nuclei), (3) the weak force (which governs radioactive decay and some fusion reactions), and (4) gravity. Observing the Higgs boson may also unleash a black hole or anti-matter that will annihilate us all, say a few.

What does this have to do with the Large Hadron Collider?

The big bang theory tells us that the known universe once had no dimensions at all—no up

or down, no left or right, no passage of time, and laws of physics beyond our vision.

How does an infinitely dense universe become a vast and spacious one? And how is it filled

with matter? In theory, as the early universe expanded, energy should have condensed into

equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would then have annihilated each other on

contact, reverting to pure energy. On paper, the universe should be empty. The LHC

experiments may help physicists understand our good fortune to be in a universe that grew

with just enough more matter than antimatter. Scientists at CERN hope to observe the

Higgs boson.

The LHC accelerates two particle beams, called hadrons, around a 17-mile ring in opposite

directions. The goal is to get the two beams to collide at nearly the speed of light. But that’s

hard because the beams are so small, and the scientists don’t expect a collision every time.

If a collision does occur, it could create smaller pieces of matter –particles – a scenario

similar to that at the beginning of the universe, giving scientists a unique look at the

universe’s origins and at particles never before observed. Particles such as the Higgs boson.

To understand Higgs boson in more simpler terms take an example of an avalanche.During avalanches tiny snowballs roll down the hill to form large snow balls and this happens to a large number of those tiny snowballs. Now consider the avalanche to be the Big Bang, the tiny snow balls to be the cosmic dust which eventually collect to give stars, planets and life. The avalanche would have been caused by some natural trigger or some human activity and there was snow all around.

But the moment the Big Bang happened there was nothing around, just empty space and vacuum. 3 questions arise :

* What caused the Big Bang?* What was the particle around at that time?* How was the particle there?

These questions will have answer if the experiment at LHC is successful.

Why is the Higgs boson to hard to detect?

The Higgs boson, however, only exists at high energies - and only lasts for fractions of a second, then decays into other particles. Scientists will be looking for trace patterns of decay that indicate the Higgs has made an appearance.

Will the Higgs boson allow time travel?

The Higgs boson itself won’t allow time travel. But the LHC may, say some scientists.

Remember String Theory, the contending grand theory of the universe? It claims that the world is made of tiny vibrating strings. It also claims that there exist 10 dimensions to space time (we currently observe only four: think of a point, a square, a box, and time).

If true, then the LHC may create the high-energy environments that enable particles to jump in and out of these six hidden dimensions.

A recent essay in The New York Times suggests that the Higgs boson itself may be using time travel to prevent itself from being discovered: hence all the delays at Fermilab and CERN.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)

ATLAS is designed as a general-purpose detector. When the proton beams produced by the Large Hadron Collider interact in the center of the detector, a variety of different particles with a broad range of energies may be produced. Rather than focusing on a particular physical process, ATLAS is designed to measure the broadest possible range of signals. This is intended to ensure that, whatever form any new physical processes or particles might take, ATLAS will be able to detect them and measure their properties. Experiments at earlier colliders, such as the Tevatron and Large Electron-Positron Collider were designed based on a similar philosophy. However, the unique challenges of the Large Hadron Collider—its unprecedented energy and extremely high rate of collisions—require ATLAS to be larger and more complex than any detector ever built.

What does this have to do with God?

Leon Lederman, the 1988 Nobel prize winner in physics and former director of Fermilab, coined the phrase “the God particle” for the Higgs boson because it would explain what gives nature's fundamental particles mass. But Mr. Lederman wasn't religious. He also famously joked: "Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money."

When Moses saw God, according to the Bible’s Book of Numbers, his face was radiant for days. Scientists at CERN eagerly await their own sighting of the so-called God particle.

"Imagine a house with a lot of children on Christmas Eve, and you've pretty much captured the mood," Thomas LeCompte told the Monitor in an email exchange from the lab in Geneva.

The picture above is an illustration of creation of universe by the God particle. It is a modified form of ‘Creation of Adam’ painting by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel cieling.