A last day of Zen and since it is Sunday, I thought I would post a quasi-religious article…..
For centuries people have been in search of God and none so far have actually concrete proof of the existence….but has all that changed?
The leaders of two experiments, Atlas and CMS, revealed their findings to a packed seminar at the CERN physics research centre near Geneva, where they have tried to find traces of the elusive boson by smashing particles together at near light-speed in the Large Hadron Collider.
The experiments generated such excitement by independently reaching very similar conclusions. But the scientists were quick to warn that their results have not yet reached the level of certainty that would let them claim a discovery — hence Higgs’s caution.
Under what is known as the Standard Model of Physics, the boson is posited to have been the agent that gave mass and energy to matter after the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago – leading some to nickname it the “God particle.”
Its discovery would fill the last remaining hole in the model. However, that does not mean it must exist, and some eminent physicists such as Stephen Hawking believe it does not.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a vast underground particle accelerator that costs 200,000 Swiss francs ($215,000) an hour to run, is designed to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang to allow particles such as the Higgs boson to be found and studied.
While the boson’s discovery would cement current knowledge about particles such as electrons and photons, proof that it does not exist would undermine the foundations of accepted theories of the make-up of the universe.
The particle is so short-lived that it can only be detected from the particles that it decays into. In the course of millions of collisions, the scientists are hunting for a significant excess of a particular combination of decay particles.
Okay it is a particle and not the actual deity….but it is still a big leap for the big bang! Wait! Are they saying Hawkings was wrong?