Monday, March 18, 2013

The God Particle

 
Wikipedia image from NASA

Over the past week, you may have heard increasingly confident statements reported in the popular press that the elusive Higgs boson - the so-called "God particle" - had been found. On March 14, on what would have been Einstein's 134th birthday, Reuters' headline read "Strong Signs Higgs Boson Has Been Found:CERN". Two days later, Forbes' headline read "CERN Now Certain It Has Discovered The Higgs Boson". The particle in question was actually detected last July but scientists were not about to commit to a discovery until they had conducted much more analysis of the data.


So why all the excitement? Well for one thing, experimental physicists and cosmologists had been searching in vain for this particular subatomic particle for almost 50 years. The Higgs boson is named for the British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first postulated its existence in 1964. Secondly, it was the only particle in the Standard Model that had not yet been discovered. The Standard Model of Physics provides the best explanation of how the fundamental particles of matter and the three of the four fundamental forces are related.  As noted on a CERN webpage: "Developed in the early 1970s, it has successfully explained almost all experimental results and precisely predicted a wide variety of phenomena."  Unfortunately one theoretically predicted piece of the model has been missing.  The missing piece, the Higgs boson, was needed to explain why the Big Bang resulted in the formation of the universe...why something was able to be created from nothing 13.7 billion years ago. The Higgs boson is the particle that triggered the Big Bang..it joins and gives mass to everything. Had this particle not ever been found, it would jeopardize the Standard Model, one of the most established and tested theories in all of physics and the Big Bang would become even a bigger enigma than it is.


The discovery of the Higgs boson was made at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. This equipment uses electromagnetic energy to accelerate protons in opposite directions to 99.9% of the speed of light through a tube 17 miles in circumference. The collisions of these counter-accelerating protons produce energies close to those believed to exist at the time of the Big Bang.
Cern LHC

The United States was building a collider in Texas a couple of decades ago. Planned to be nearly three times larger than the CERN collider, the Superconducting Super Collider was cancelled because of budgetary problems in 1993. The budgetary problem was its cost of $12 billion, which is less than 2% of the current US defense budget. Funny how we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems and wars and then balk at a pittance for fundamental scientific research. Maybe it's about what you can expect in a country where 46% believe in creationism - i.e., that man did not evolve but was created in his existing form about 10,000 years ago and 63% support the death penalty.

On the good news front, about 70% ofAmericans now believe that global warming is happening. Score one for scientific competency.  And Maryland joined the civilized world in abolishing the death penalty - the 18th state to do so.  
 
Death Penalty Map, c.2011 [Wikipedia]
 
 
 
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