One of scientists’ favorite obsessions is unity. We want to know how everything is connected in one equation, one particle, one rule.
For years physicists thought they found the theory that unified the very big (gravity, planets and the universe) with the very small (quantum mechanics, which is smaller than atoms, than quarks, than anything that you can imagine).
That was string theory, but no advances have been made since the ’70s. Now there is a new theory of unity: the Higgs Boson, more commonly known as “The God Particle.” This is the particle that validates the existence of mass, that determines whether something is heavy (like a proton or a neutron) or light (like a photon). It’s said that the Higgs Field is the same everywhere in the universe, and it’s only the different ways that particles interact with it that give rise to mass.
I first read about the Higgs Boson in one of my favorite publications, “Discover Magazine.” Of course, what the article was really about was the particle collider being built to find and prove the existence of the Higgs Boson.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is 17 miles in circumference, whirring away 200 feet underneath the French-Swiss border. Two long, rounded metal tubes — one for steering protons clockwise, one for counterclockwise — form the circle. More than 1,000 superconducting magnets are in place, to keep the seven-trillion electron volts on track. The ring is kept super-cooled by liquid helium, at temperatures tantalizingly close to absolute zero, or in layman’s terms, colder than the great empty void of the universe itself. At 99.99999% the speed of light, protons will be accelerated around the ring at such speeds that in 10 hours, they could go to Neptune (about four billion kilometers from Earth) and back. At six collision points around the massive metal donut, physicists are watching the particles collide.
An unexpected explosion in 2008 delayed the particle-accelerating by a year and a half, but finally in March of 2010, the LHC was powered on, and stayed on. Still, they aren’t operating at full power. That’ll take a few more years (some physicists are aiming for 33 trillion volts by 2030).
Why are these physicists smashing protons together at faster speeds than my brain can imagine? To find evidence for the Higgs Boson. The qualities of the LHC mimic the environment of the Big Bang; colliding protons with that force mimics a trillionth of a second after the big bang, which is what physicists are most interested in.
And yet, there are some doubts. Earth-shattering kinds of doubts. Well, more like Earth-being-inhaled-by-a-black-hole kinds of doubts.
You probably remember all those people in the news telling us the LHC was going to cause a black hole. There was some fuzzy-haired physicist on the news who kept saying that the minute this machine began operating at full power, the particles it was colliding would create such massive amounts of gravity in such a tiny little space, that the earth would be subsequently gobbled up by the vacuum. I remember this guy saying that there was a 50 percent chance this could happen. He didn’t get his number by statistical theories, no, he said 50 percent because it either “will happen, or it won’t.”
This is my biggest pet peeve when comes to science in the news. They report things that are so complex in tiny little sound-bites and expect us to understand them, which of course, we don’t. And when a large population of human beings doesn’t understand something, they usually end up fearing it.
Thankfully, the fear of a black hole was a brief obstacle and the LHC is whirring away once again. All this year physicists have been collecting priceless data about particles tinier than protons. They’re finding particles they didn’t even know existed, and according to a “New York Times” article published on Nov. 1, they are way ahead of schedule, data-collection-wise. Along with the primitive evidence gathered about the Higgs Boson, they’re also exploring science-fiction-caliber particles like dark matter (which is supposedly responsible for holding the universe together).
For now, the collider will shut down from Dec. 6 until February of 2011. By the end of that year, physicists are confident that a significant dent will be made in the search for the Higgs Boson, and they’ll be one step closer to figuring out the universe.
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